From September 22-27, 2019, Bertinoro, Italy, hosted the ScalPerf'19 workshop. ScalPerf aims at taking an integrated look at the opportunities and constraints on the road to ever higher performance and productivity of computing systems. Distinguished researchers are invited to exchange their perspectives on different areas that can contribute to scalable computing.

This year, the topic of discussion was "Open problems and future opportunities for high performance and high productivity computing". Performance of computing systems has kept on an exponential curve (with respect to several metrics) for about seven decades. This trend has been enabled by spectacular technological developments, but it has also required considerable conceptual innovations in the areas of machine architecture and organization, of system software, of languages and compilers, of application software, of tools, of models of computation, and of algorithms. In spite of tremendous progress, several questions, some of which of a fundamental nature, have not yet been answered satisfactorily.

My contribution to the discussion was a presentation titled "On the ROI of Parallel Performance Optimization" where I provided insights and experiences gathered from the POP CoE project so far. The workshop is hosted at the University Residential Center, a beautiful medieval castle on top of the hill inside the village of Bertinoro. The picture below shows the view of the speaker oin the presentation room.

-- Bernd Mohr (JSC)