With the delivery of the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) first exascale system, Frontier, in 2022, and the upcoming deployment of Aurora and El Capitan systems by next year, researchers will have the most sophisticated computational tools at their disposal to conduct groundbreaking research. Exascale machines can perform more than a billion billion calculations per […]
Building a Capable Computing Ecosystem for Exascale
September 18, 2023 by
With ECP, working together was a prerequisite for participation. “From the beginning, the teams had this so-called ‘shared fate,’” says Siegel. When incorporating new capabilities, applications teams had to consider relevant software tools developed by others that could help meet their performance targets, and if they didn’t choose to use them….
EXAALT-ing Molecular Dynamics to the Power of Exascale
June 21, 2023 by
As part of the Exascale Computing Project (ECP), a collaborative team of scientists, software developers, and hardware integration specialists from across the Department of Energy (DOE) has developed the Exascale Atomistics for Accuracy, Length, and Time (EXAALT) application to bring molecular dynamics (MD) into the exascale era. Danny Perez, a physicist within the Theoretical Division at Los Alamos National Laboratory and the project’s principal investigator says, “We’ve implemented new scalable methods that allow us to access as much of the accuracy, length and time space as possible on exascale machines by rethinking our methods and developing algorithms that go around some of the bottlenecks that limited scaling previously.” Such a capability has potential to revolutionize MD.
Power Grid Modeling Tool Launched on Frontier Exascale Supercomputer
June 1, 2023 by
Exascale Grid Optimization (ExaGO), a power grid simulation and optimization platform developed by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), is the first of its kind to run on Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s (ORNL) Frontier, the first supercomputer in the world to reach exascale. Frontier, which was launched this spring, can calculate more than 1 quintillion operations per second and […]
LLNL’s Lori Diachin Named Director of Exascale Computing Project
May 31, 2023 by
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Lori Diachin will take over as director of the Department of Energy’s Exascale Computing Project on June 1, “guiding the successful, multi-institutional high-performance computing effort through its final stages,” ECP said in its announcement. Diachin, who is currently the principal deputy associate director for LLNL’s Computing Directorate, has served as ECP’s […]
Call for Nominations to Replace ASCR’s Barb Helland
January 13, 2023 by
A call for nominations has been issued to find a replacement for Barb Helland, the long-time and esteemed associate director for the Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR), by the Office of Science at the U.S. Department of Energy. Helland will officially retire on January 15. Helland, known to be media-shy, has politely declined […]
@HPCpodcast: Oak Ridge Assoc. Director Dr. Jeff Nichols on Frontier, on History-Making HPC, and on His Retirement
April 6, 2022 by
In this episode of the @HPCpodcast, join us for a rare, behind-the-scenes glimpse at the Frontier exascale supercomputer, how it was built in the middle of a pandemic and how it’s being prepared for full user-readiness. Frontier is a $600 million, 30 MW system comprised of 50-60 million parts in more than 100 cabinets, deployed at the Oak Ridge….
HPE and Ayar Labs Partner to Bring Optical I/O to Slingshot Fabric for HPC and AI
February 24, 2022 by
HPC systems leader Hewlett Packard Enterprise and startup Ayar Labs, maker of chip-to-chip optical I/O connectivity, today announced a strategic collaboration to integrate silicon photonics within HPE’s high performance Slingshot fabric. Longer term, HPE envisions future generations of HPC systems interconnects significantly enhanced by optical I/O, which is a silicon photonics-based technology that uses light instead of electricity to transmit data. The technology addresses both the need for higher data rates and improved energy efficiency (see “Composable HPC-AI at Scale: The Emergence of Optical I/O Chiplets”).
