‘Let’s Talk Exascale’: Storing and Managing Exa-class Data Volumes

In this new edition of “Let’s Talk Exascale” from the Department of Energy’s Exascale Computing Project, the ECP’s Scott Gibson talks with Jim Ahrens of Los Alamos National Laboratory about the project’s data and visualization portfolio.

As Ahrens said in this interview, “We can compute much faster than we can save and store data these days – specifically, exascale system concurrency is expected to grow by five or six orders of magnitude, yet system memory and IO bandwidth is only expected to grow by one or two orders of magnitude. And this discrepancy is really front and center for us to address. We need to figure out methods to address this issue.”

He said the mission of the sub-project teams working on develop of the data and visualization portfolio “is to deliver software – one of the great things about exascale is it puts software front and center. We will have solutions for our ECP application teams in the 2023 timeframe when the exascale systems are delivered.”