Until unequivocal requirements are included consistently in procurements of HPC machines, vendors are unlikely to take user requests for standardization seriously. In 1995, a national task force was convened to address this situation. Representatives from both the HPC industry and major HPC user sites participated in the effort. They drafted standard verbiage for system software and tools requirements, for use in preparing RFPs and other procurement documents. It goes on to describe the comprehensive discussions held by the task force on all aspects of system software and tools - from distributed file systems to interactive debuggers and parallelizing compilers.
Hyperlinks refer to pertinent sections of the task force's formal documentation.
The rationale for how the group established guidelines is presented, including where elements were omitted because it was felt that technology is not sufficiently mature for standardization or because the need was representative of only some user sites. Attention is drawn to the group's discussions on obstacles to standardization and promising areas for further work. A concluding chapter discusses the outcomes of the task force efforts and reflects on what can be done to improve the quality and consistency of HPC software support. About the Author Cherri M. Pancake is Professor of Computer Science and Intel Faculty Fellow at Oregon State University. Her research area is software support for high performance computing, with emphasis on usability requirements and user interface design.