Last year the Accelerating Competitiveness through Computational Excellence (ACCEL) program at the US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) launched 24 new projects with industry. With national competitiveness garnering growing attention and the launch of the National Strategic Computing Initiative, programs such as ACCEL are poised for growth.
ACCEL is an ORNL program that is helping start-up companies to Fortune 500 giants supercharge their competitiveness through access to world-class computational resources and expertise not available elsewhere. These businesses are gaining hands-on experience applying advanced computational tools—accessed through the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), a DOE Office of Science User Facility—to their problems and realizing bottom-line business benefits.
Tabor Communications, which has publications spanning supercomputing (HPCwire) and HPC adoption by industry (EnterpriseTech), closely follows the interaction between commercial enterprises and the national labs to ‘democratize’ HPC. ORNL posted an update article about ACCEL today (excerpt and link below).
“Even as the program marks the completion of its seventh year, Suzy Tichenor, director of the Industrial Partnerships Program, noted that she is asked often to explain why Oak Ridge launched such an effort. She said the answer is threefold.
“First, the program aligns with the ORNL and OLCF missions to produce high impact science and engineering results,” Tichenor said. “Industry conducts high impact science and engineering research but doesn’t have computing systems as powerful as those of the OLCF. By providing access to Titan, we’re enabling these companies to solve more complex problems than they can with their in-house resources.
“Then they must make these results public,” she continued. “That’s generally a requirement. Often companies would not publish this information. But by allowing companies to use the OLCF resources, we are drawing out that information and helping to lift the knowledge base of the broader science and engineering community. So this is a real win–win for everyone.”
The ORNL article, written by Jeff Gary, can be read in full at: https://www.olcf.ornl.gov/2016/01/26/accel-program-continues-to-experience-growth-success/