What does a supercomputer center do when it’s operating two systems among the TOP-10 most powerful in the world — one of them the first system to cross the exascale milestone? It starts planning its successor. The center is Oak Ridge National Lab, one of several U.S. Department of Energy national labs permanently at the tip of the computing spear.
In this @HPCpodcast episode we caught up with Matt Sieger, project director for the sixth iteration of the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility’s (OLCF-6) next-generation supercomputer, the successor to the Frontier exascale system. Matt provices a glimpse of the project, its objectives, status, and timelines, along with some surprising possibilities regarding vendors that mightbuild, or contribute to, OLCF-6.
Meet Discovery, the supercomputer to succeed Frontier (the current #1 at 1.19 exaflops in 64 bits) while Summit (the current #7 at 148.8 64-bit petaflops) continues to operate at OLCF, though its retirement is approaching.
With a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and after stints at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Intel’s fabrication facilities in Portland, Oregon, and a Knoxville-based startup as Chief Software Architect, Matt joined ORNL in 2009. He moved to OLCF as deputy project director for the Frontier project in 2018, and was selected to lead the effort to procure Frontier’s successor in 2021.
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