Paul Messina Presents: A Path to Capable Exascale Computing

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Paul Messina, Senior Strategic Advisor/Argonne Distinguished Fellow, Argonne

Paul Messina, Senior Strategic Advisor/Argonne Distinguished Fellow, Argonne

In this video from the 2016 Argonne Training Program on Extreme-Scale Computing, Paul Messina from Argonne presents: A Path to Capable Exascale Computing.

The President’s NSCI initiative calls for the development of Exascale computing capabilities. The U.S. Department of Energy has been charged with carrying out that role in an initiative called the Exascale Computing Project (ECP). Paul Messina has been tapped to lead the project, heading a team with representation from the six major participating DOE national laboratories: Argonne, Los Alamos, Lawrence Berkeley, Lawrence Livermore, Oak Ridge and Sandia. The project program office is located at Oak Ridge.

“A capable exascale system is defined as a supercomputer that:

  • Can solve science problems 50X faster (or more complex) than on the 20PF systems (Titan, Sequoia) of today or 100X faster than on Mira
  • In a power envelope of 20-30 MW
  • Is sufficiently resilient that user intervention due to hardware or system faults is on the order of a week on average, and
  • Has a software stack that meets the needs of a broad spectrum of applications and workloads.”

The Argonne Training Program on Extreme-Scale Computing (ATPESC) provides intensive, two-week training on the key skills, approaches, and tools to design, implement, and execute computational science and engineering applications on current high-end computing systems and the leadership-class computing systems of the future. As a bridge to that future, this two-week program fills the gap that exists in the training computational scientists typically receive through formal education or other shorter courses. With around 65 participants accepted each year, admission to the ATPESC program is highly competitive. ATPESC is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.

ECPDr. Paul Messina is a senior strategic advisor and Argonne Distinguished Fellow at Argonne National Laboratory. He is Project Director for the US DOE Exascale Computing Project, a multi-laboratory project. During 2008-2015 he served as Director of Science for the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility and in 2002-2004 as Distinguished Senior Computer Scientist at Argonne and as Advisor to the Director General at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research). From 1987-2002, Dr. Messina served as founding Director of California Institute of Technology’s (Caltech) Center for Advanced Computing Research, as Assistant Vice President for Scientific Computing, and as Faculty Associate for Scientific Computing, Caltech. During a leave from Caltech in 1999-2000, he led the DOE-NNSA Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative. In his first association with Argonne from 1973-1987, he held a number of positions in the Applied Mathematics Division and was the founding Director of the Mathematics and Computer Science Division.

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