Exascale supercomputing – which systems vendors can deliver it, which supercomputing centers can access it, which countries have it – will no doubt be a hot topic at the ISC 2022 conference in Germany later this month and in government policy circles concerned with HPC’s geopolitical impact. The discussion is only heating up with a […]
Exascale Computing Project BoF Days May 10-12
May 9, 2022 by
May 9, 2022 — The Exascale Computing Project (ECP) 2022 Community Birds-of-a-Feather (BOF) Days will take place Tuesday, May 10–Thursday, May 12, with six to eight sessions per day conducted via Zoom. Registration and the agenda can be found here. The 2022 Community BOF Days is designed to provide an opportunity for the high-performance computing […]
ExaIO: Access and Manage Storage of Data Efficiently and at Scale on Exascale Systems
April 19, 2022 by
As the word exascale implies, the forthcoming generation exascale supercomputer systems will deliver 1018 flop/s of scalable computing capability. All that computing capability will be for naught if the storage hardware and I/O software stack cannot meet the storage needs of applications running at scale—leaving applications either to drown in data when attempting to write to storage or starve while waiting to read data from storage. Suren Byna, PI of the ExaIO project in the Exascale Computing Project (ECP) and computer staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, highlights the need for preparation to address the I/O needs of exascale supercomputers by noting that storage is typically the last subsystem available for testing on these systems.
Let’s Talk Exascale: Container Technologies for Exascale Computing
January 12, 2022 by
In this episode of the Exascale Computing Project’s (ECP) Let’s Talk Exascale podcast series, Andrew Younge of Sandia National Laboratories discusses container technology and how it fits into the wider scheme of exascale and high-performance computing (HPC). Container technology has revolutionized software development by providing greater software flexibility, reliability, ease of deployment and portability. But […]
Exascale Hardware Evaluation: Workflow Analysis for Supercomputer Procurements
October 8, 2021 by
It is well known in the high-performance computing (HPC) community that many (perhaps most) HPC workloads exhibit dynamic performance envelopes that can stress the memory, compute, network, and storage capabilities of modern supercomputers. Optimizing HPC workloads to run efficiently on existing hardware systems is challenging, but attempting to quantify the performance envelopes of HPC workloads to extrapolate performance predictions for HPC workloads on new system architectures is even more challenging, albeit essential. This predictive analysis is beneficial because it helps each data center’s supercomputer procurement team extrapolate to the new machines and system architectures that will deliver the most performance for production workloads at their datacenter. However, once a supercomputer is installed, configured, made available to users, and benchmarked, it is too late to consider fundamental architectural changes.
ExaWind: How Exascale-class HPC Will Help Optimize Skyscraper-sized Wind Turbines of the Future
October 6, 2021 by
A wind power revolution is blowing through the U.S. electrical industry, and exascale-class supercomputing is expected to play an increasingly instrumental role in its growth. The Energy Information Administration puts wind power’s share of America’s electricity generation at 8.4 percent in 2020, up from less than 1 percent in 1990. Increasingly competitive on cost and […]
Let’s Talk Exascale: Chandrasekaran on Teaching Supercomputing and Leading ECP’s SOLLVE Project
October 5, 2021 by
In this episode of the Exascale Computing Project’s Let’s Talk Exascale, the ECP’s Scott Gibson interviewed Sunita Chandrasekaran, the new principal investigator of the ECP SOLLVE (Scaling OpenMP With LLVm for Exascale Performance and Portability) project. She replaces Barbara Chapman in the role, whom ECP Software Technology Director Mike Heroux said has been an invaluable […]
A Look Inside the US’s 1st Exascale Supercomputer Facility
September 30, 2021 by
Preparing for the nation’s first exascale system, the upcoming HPE Cray EX Frontier “Frontier” system at the US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), has been a colossal undertaking. Since the spring of 2020, ORNL staff members have made numerous modifications to the building and room that will house Frontier, a system that will […]
Ruby Leung, Chief Scientist for Energy Exascale Earth System Model Project, Named a DOE Distinguished Scientist Fellow.
September 28, 2021 by
Ruby Leung likes to ask questions. That started at her high school in Hong Kong, where she also became interested in science. “I was one of those kids in science who always was curious. And then you can find the answers,” said Leung, an atmospheric scientist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in Richland, Washington. “Of course, after you […]
Preparing for Exascale: Aurora to Drive Brain Map Construction
September 24, 2021 by
The U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory will be home to one of the nation’s first exascale supercomputers when Aurora arrives in 2022. To prepare codes for the architecture and scale of the system, 15 research teams are taking part in the Aurora Early Science Program through the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF), a […]
