Sandia National Laboratories employes thousands of researchers among its more than 16,000 staff members, researchers who use some of the world’s most powerful supercomputers for scientific discovery.
We recently talked with Doug Kothe, who has served in senior management roles at four of the U.S. Department of Energy’s national labs, to talk about the mission-driven reasons why talented researchers and computer scientists should seriously consider a career with the national labs – knowing, of course, that their skills also are in high demand from private sector technology companies.
Kothe, who is Associate Labs Director for Advanced Science and Technology and Chief Research Officer at Sandia, has been at the forefront of advanced scientific computing for decades. He took on a senior role at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility in its drive to stand up Frontier, the world’s first, exascale-class supercomputer, in 2022. This culminated a multi-year effort driven by the DOE’s Exascale Computing Project to develop an entire hardware-software ecosystem dedicated to the idea of “capable exascale,” the notion that Frontier built for the most demanding workloads and addressed the real-world challenges of scientists and engineers.
This is the kind of work that Kothe discusses in this interview, it’s the kind of work that enables a national lab such as Sandia to offer a unique work experience and makes a career at the national labs uniquely rewarding. He also discusses the future of leadership-class supercomputing at Sandia and other labs, describing the advanced computing infrastructure that only lab researchers will have the opportunity to access.
