On November 14, US Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz announced two new high performance computing (HPC) awards, the first program to set a solid stake in the ground for the attainment of US exascale computing. A video of that presentation is now available for public viewing.
As we covered previously, Secretary Moniz revealed that the DOE would be making $325 million available for the construction of two state-of-the-art supercomputers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories. The initiative is an extension of the joint Collaboration of Oak Ridge, Argonne, and Lawrence Livermore laboratories, aka the CORAL collaboration, announced earlier this year.
Summit, to be housed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, will provide at least five times the performance of the lab’s current leadership system Titan, said Moniz, while Livermore’s new computer, called Sierra, will deliver at least seven times more performance. And although details were not disclosed yet, Argonne’s CORAL award will be forthcoming.
In addition to the sizable $325 million supercomputing investment, Secretary Moniz also announced approximately $100 million in funding to develop extreme scale supercomputing technologies as part of FastForward 2, a joint research and development program between government labs and vendor partners Cray, Intel, NVIDIA and AMD.
Expected to come online in the 2017 timeframe, the two 150-petaflops scale systems represent a five-to-seven factor speed-up above current top systems, but they must meet that challenge with only ten percent more energy. “We’re going beyond 10 MW for a single computer already, so energy-efficiency will be a major focus [of the program],” noted the Secretary.
Moniz emphasized the importance of this sizable investment for applications critical to the United States and the world. Planned uses include weapons simulations that support nuclear non-proliferation, climate modeling, combustion, and engineering. Already, such government-industry collaborations have resulted in efficiently engineered systems, for example so called super-trucks, class A vehicles that have been made 60 percent more efficient thanks to HPC-powered modeling.
“We are going to see enormously important contributions across the science, energy and nuclear security activities of the Department,” said Moniz in closing. “Once again, we could not do it without the support of these and other key members of Congress who support the labs and more importantly the American science enterprise, that it remains the driver of innovation, economic development and security in this country.”
Following Moniz’s turn at the podium, Senator Andrew Lamar Alexander, Jr. (R-TN) took the opportunity to discuss the significance of the bipartisan initiative, noting with a smile that it was his wish that once again the world’s fastest supercomputer would reside in Oak Ridge, Tenn. But he added, “the important thing is not only the speed of the computer, but it’s the fact that we use it better. As a member of Congress, I like to see the cooperation of the three laboratories in combining our resources rather than competing. We’re not competing with each other, we’re working together to make this the place in the world with the best supercomputing.”