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Dell: Threats and Opportunities for U.S. HPC Leadership

[SPONSORED GUEST ARTICLE]   Driving the development and leveraging the use of supercomputing technologies and systems is a critical strategic advantage for geopolitical players. The U.S. Council on Competitiveness, which champions entrepreneurship and commercialization of innovative ideas, coined the phrase “To Out-compute is to Out-compete” for describing the place of supercomputing as a centerpiece of competitive strategies across science, business and national defense. In fact, the U.S., having been at the forefront of supercomputing for more than 50 years, is under increasing international pressure as more countries and regions increase their investments in HPC and associated areas, including AI, applications development and optimization, and workforce development and retention.

Sutharshan Named ORNL Deputy for Operations

March 13, 2023 — Oak Ridge, TN — Balendra Sutharshan has been named chief operating officer for Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He will begin serving as ORNL’s deputy for operations and as executive vice president, operations, for UT-Battelle LLC effective April 1. He will succeed Alan Icenhour, who is retiring this spring after serving in […]

Oak Ridge Lab Names Jeff Smith Interim Director, Hires Search Firm

While Oak Ridge National Laboratory continues its search for a successor to outgoing lab Director Thomas Zacharia, the lab has named as its interim director Jeff Smith, who served for 21 years as ORNL’s Deputy for Operations before retiring last April. Zacharia announced his retirement in July after more than five years as director. UT-Battelle, […]

Call for Nominations to Replace ASCR’s Barb Helland

A call for nominations has been issued to find a replacement for Barb Helland, the long-time and esteemed associate director for the Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR), by the Office of Science at the U.S. Department of Energy. Helland will officially retire on January 15. Helland, known to be media-shy, has politely declined […]

Pre-proposals for Allocations of National Lab HPC Resources Due Nov. 28

The U.S. Department of Energy’s ASCR Leadership Computing Challenge (ALCC) is now seeking proposals for the 2023-2024 allocation year. Pre-proposals are due by 8 pm (ET) on Monday, November 28, 2022. Open to researchers from industry, academia and national laboratories, the ALCC program allocates supercomputing time at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, Oak Ridge Leadership Computing […]

@HPCpodcast at SC22: An Analysis of the New TOP500 List

This special SC22 edition looks at the new TOP500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, released today. It marks the 60th edition of the list, repesenting 30 years of systematic data on the highest performing computer architecture and configurations. While this TOP500 is not full of surprises, there’s a new no. 1 at the top of the GREEN500, and across all the categories of the list there’s always important historical data and valuable tea leaves pointing to future trends….

Getting to Exascale Day 2022 with an Exascale System Wasn’t Easy

Finally, after 15-plus years of intellectual strain (planning), bureaucratic wrangling (budgeting), technical toil (system building) and, probably, some tears, the HPC community has arrived at an Exascale Day, October 18 (1018), on which we actually have a certified exaFLOPS supercomputer: Frontier, at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Exascale is no longer in the future, it’s here, […]

A Look Inside the AMD-HPE Blade that Drives Frontier, the World’s First Exascale Supercomputer

[SPONSORED CONTENT]  The new number 1 supercomputer in the world, the AMD-powered and HPE-built Frontier, is celebrated today, Exascale Day, as the world’s first exascale (a billion billion calculations per second) HPC system. Recognized at last spring’s ISC conference in Hamburg for having exceeded the exascale barrier, a display of the Frontier blade in HPE’s ISC booth was a focus of attention on the conference floor. We thought it would be interesting to sit down with two senior officials from AMD and HPE to talk about the Frontier blade, what’s in it, its design innovations and the anticipated, long-term impacts of the blade on leadership supercomputing and on systems used by the broader HPC industry.

Aurora on Schedule? Intel Says it’s Shipping Ponte Vecchio-Sapphire Rapids Blades to Argonne

The rumors had begun to cirulate – October is near, that starts the fourth quarter, 2023 isn’t far behind, all of which means Intel is coming up against a hard deadline to deliver its delayed Aurora exascale-class supercomputer to Argonne National Laboratory by the end of the year. Is another delay in the offing?
Then, yesterday, Intel tweeted this out: “Server blades with Intel 4th Gen Xeon and Ponte Vecchio, which uses Intel’s most advanced IP and packaging technology, are now shipping to Argonne National Labs to power the Aurora supercomputer!” And the tweet was backed by comments to the same effect from CEO Pat Gelsinger

DOE SciDAC: $30M Awarded to 5 National Labs for Research on High Energy Physics through Advanced Computing

Sept. 21, 2022 — Today, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced $30 million in funding for five projects in computation and simulation techniques and tools to understand the universe via collaborations that enable effective use of DOE high-performance computers. The Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) partnership in high energy physics brings together applied mathematicians and […]