Video: An Update on the Exascale Computing Project

In this video, Mike Bernhardt sits down with Doug Kothe from the Exascale Computing Project for a quick update and a look ahead.

As we traverse the second half of the 2018 calendar year, the Exascale Computing Project (ECP) continues to execute confidently toward our mission of accelerating the delivery of a capable exascale computing ecosystem* to coincide with the nation’s first exascale platforms in the early 2020s. Our efforts in the project’s critical research areas of application development, software technology, and hardware and integration, supported by about 1,000 researchers, scientists, vendor participants, and project management experts further intensify as we make significant strides in addressing the four major challenges of exascale computing: parallelism, memory and storage, reliability, and energy consumption.

Topics include:

  • ExaLearn. As the newest ECP Co-Design Center, ExaLearn is focused on Machine Learning (ML) Technologies and being led by Frank Alexander at Brookhaven National Laboratory. ExaLearn is a timely announcement and is a collaboration initially consisting of experts from eight multipurpose DOE labs.
  • The ECP Software Technology Capability Assessment Report. Designed to serve the ECP research community as well as the broader HPC community. The intent is to give ECP followers a good overview of the document, an overview explanation from our Software Technology Director, Mike Heroux, and we’ve provided a link for downloading the report.
  • Recent highlights on the ExaSMR project. SMR stands for small modular reactor. This is a project aimed at high-fidelity modeling of coupled neutronics and fluid dynamics to create virtual experimental datasets for SMRs under varying operational scenarios. This capability will help to validate fundamental design parameters including the turbulent mixing conditions necessary for natural circulation and steady-state critical heat flux margins between the moderator and fuel. It will also provide validation for low-order engineering simulations and reduce conservative operational margins resulting in higher updates and longer fuel cycles. The ExaSMR product can be thought of a virtual test reactor for advanced designs via experimental-quality simulations of reactor behavior. In addition to the highlight document, ECP’s Scott Gibson sat down with the ExaSMR principal investigator, Steven Hamilton (ORNL), to discuss this highlight in more detail.
  • The key role performance measurement plays for a project such as ECP in support of software deployment as it relates to the Hardware and Integration focus of ECP.

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