Petaflops also was the subject of a Technical Program panel, while a University of Delaware and Jet Propulsion Laboratory-Caltech paper addressed HTMT's superconducting processors. There were two Goddard Space Flight Center papers about performance comparison, one on satellite image segmentation and the other on a regional climate model. New ways of managing this complexity are cropping up, and several were described. Innovations in software engineering and programming languages are having an impact on high-performance computing usage. One software engineering approach is the framework , where large software codes are divided into collections of objects having flexible and well-defined interfaces.
Researchers can then independently develop and improve modules for particular tasks or applications.
In a paper, researchers from a NASA ESS Project-funded Grand Challenge team described their Cactus code for studying relativistic astrophysical phenomena. Among the code's uses is simulating neutron star mergers. Modularity is a key feature of the Java programming language, which is gaining ground as an efficient way of developing large-scale scientific and engineering codes. Performance and numerical issues are being overcome to an extent. General application complexity is another challenge being met with a variety of approaches.