Report on the state of the art of worldwide co-design centres

The HPC community have set themselves the target of reaching exa-scale performance by 2020. It is not a question of whether this target will be met, but instead whether or not an exa-scale machine can be programmed and used effectively to perform science at a scale never before attainable. There are many challenges in many different areas to overcome if the community are to scale their current scientific codes up to the exa-flop level and one of the approaches to solving this is through the use of co-design, where interdisciplinary teams work together to solve a specific problem.

However this development methodology is still relatively immature and in this report we gather the opinions of co-design from those in the HPC field, consider the positive and negative impact of such an approach, survey how co-design is currently being used and make some recommendations about how European projects might more effectively take advantage of this methodology to help solve the exa-scale challenge.