Abstract
The best paths to the exascale summit are debatable, but all are narrow and treacherous, constrained by fundamental laws of physics, capital cost, operating cost, power requirements, programmability, and reliability. Many scientific and engineering applications force the modeling community to attempt to scale this summit. Drawing on vendor projections and experiences with scientific codes on contemporary platforms, we outline the challenges and propose roles and essential adaptations for mathematical modelers in one of the great global scientific quests the next decade. (C) 2010 Published by Elsevier Masson SAS on behalf of Academie des sciences.