LLNL: 9,000 Exascale Nodes for Power Grid Optimization

Ensuring the nation’s electrical power grid can function with limited disruptions in the event of a natural disaster, catastrophic weather or a manmade attack is a key national security challenge. Compounding the challenge of grid management is the increasing amount of renewable energy sources such as solar and wind that are continually added to the […]

HPC News Bytes Podcast 20230807: PCIe over Optical, Quantum at Oak Ridge, Domain-Specific Architectures, Intel Expands Oregon Fabs

Kicking off the week with a fast (4:17) review of the latest HPC news: McKinsey reported on the rise of domain-specific architectures that quantifies the slowdown of Moore’s Law and lists five DSA-boosting trends; Intel’s plans for a massive, billions-dollars-plus expansion of chip fabs in Oregon; PCI-SIG’s new workgroup to deliver PCIe technology over optical connections; Oak Ridge National Lab scientists used a Quantinuum quantum computer to produce “an intriguing scientific result” in solar cell research.

Oak Ridge Scientists Use Quantum Computer for Solar Cell Research

Oak Ridge National Laboratory has announced that researchers at the lab used the Quantinuum H1-1 quantum computer to not only demonstrated best practices for scientific computing on current quantum systems but also produced what the lab said is an intriguing scientific result. The project was funded by DOE’s Office of Basic Energy Sciences. Access to […]

Stephen Streiffer Named Director of Oak Ridge Lab

July 27, 2023 — UT-Battelle, LLC, has appointed Stephen K. Streiffer to be the next director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). He currently serves as interim director at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and will join ORNL in October. “Stephen is a proven leader with diverse experience and a commitment to mission-driven research and development,” […]

OLCF and Stony Brook: Using HPC Simulations to Learn How Cicada Wings Kill Bacteria

Over the past decade, teams of engineers, chemists and biologists have analyzed the physical and chemical properties of cicada wings, hoping to unlock the secret of their ability to kill microbes on contact. If this function of nature can be replicated by science, it may lead to products with inherently antibacterial surfaces that are more […]

EXAALT-ing Molecular Dynamics to the Power of Exascale

As part of the Exascale Computing Project (ECP), a collaborative team of scientists, software developers, and hardware integration specialists from across the Department of Energy (DOE) has developed the Exascale Atomistics for Accuracy, Length, and Time (EXAALT) application to bring molecular dynamics (MD) into the exascale era. Danny Perez, a physicist within the Theoretical Division at Los Alamos National Laboratory and the project’s principal investigator says, “We’ve implemented new scalable methods that allow us to access as much of the accuracy, length and time space as possible on exascale machines by rethinking our methods and developing algorithms that go around some of the bottlenecks that limited scaling previously.” Such a capability has potential to revolutionize MD.

Outgoing Exascale Computing Project Director Doug Kothe Takes on New Role at Sandia Labs

Doug Kothe knows about transitions, including transitions on a grand scale. The outgoing director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Exascale Computing Project helped transition the supercomputing industry into the exascale era. He took the ECP helm in October 2017, and in May 2022, the project reached a milestone with the certification of the Frontier […]

LLNL’s Lori Diachin Named Director of Exascale Computing Project

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Lori Diachin will take over as director of the Department of Energy’s Exascale Computing Project on June 1, “guiding the successful, multi-institutional high-performance computing effort through its final stages,” ECP said in its announcement. Diachin, who is currently the principal deputy associate director for LLNL’s Computing Directorate, has served as ECP’s […]

New TOP500 HPC List: Frontier Extends Lead with Performance Upgrade

After a flurry of new competitors in 2022 at the top of the TOP500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, the first list of 2023 – issued here in Hamburg this morning at the ISC conference – reveals the same top 10 systems in the same order. Still, the HPC community will no doubt […]

Kelly Chipps Named to Federal Nuclear Science Advisory Committee

May 15, 2023 — Kelly Chipps, a nuclear astrophysicist at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has been appointed to the Nuclear Science Advisory Committee, or NSAC. The committee provides official advice to DOE and the National Science Foundation, or NSF, about issues relating to the national program for basic nuclear science research. “I am honored and humbled to have […]