When the Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Summit supercomputer powers up in 2018, it will provide the Department of Energy (DOE) research community with 150 to 300 peak petaflops of computational performance. To extract the highest benefit from this multi-million dollar machine that will be five to ten times the capability of the current fastest US supercomputer, Titan, having optimized application sets is essential. But getting codes ready for much larger systems takes many months of planning, especially when there’s an architectural change, as is the case transitioning from Titan, a GPU-accelerated hybrid x86 Cray machine, to Summit, which uses IBM POWER9 CPUs and NVIDIA Volta GPUs.

To that end, the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) is focusing on getting 13 application codes ready for the coming Summit architecture. OLCF admitted 13 partnership projects, each of which focus on a different code (examples include ACME, NAMD, and NWCHEM), into its Center for Accelerated Application Readiness (CAAR) program. Under the program, application development teams and staff from the OLCF Scientific Computing group collaborate on the redesigning, porting, and optimizing of application codes for Summit’s hybrid CPU–GPU architecture.

The diverse set of CAAR application teams were chosen based on a computational and scientific review conducted by the OLCF with guidance from the ALCF, NERSC, IBM and NVIDIA. The teams will gain access to early software development systems, leadership computing resources, and will have access to technical support from the IBM/NVIDIA Center of Excellence at ORNL. After they have finished the porting and application work, teams will be required to demonstrate the effectiveness of their application through a scientific grand-challenge project performed on Titan.

The modeling and simulation applications selected for the CAAR program and their principal investigators include:

• Climate simulation code ACME, Dr. David Bader, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
• Relativistic chemistry code DIRAC, Prof. Lucas Visscher, Free University of Amsterdam
• Astrophysics simulation code FLASH, Dr. Bronson Messer, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
• Plasma physics code GTC, Dr. Zhihong Lin, University of California-Irvine
• Cosmology simulation code HACC, Dr. Salman Habib, Argonne National Laboratory
• Electronic structure application LS-DALTON, Prof. Poul Jørgenson, Aarhus University
• Biophysics simulation code NAMD, Prof. Klaus Schulten, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• Nuclear physics application NUCCOR, Dr. Gaute Hagen, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
• Computational chemistry code NWCHEM, Dr. Karol Kowalski, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
• Materials science application QMCPACK, Dr. Paul Kent, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
• Combustion engineering code RAPTOR, Dr. Joseph Oefelein, Sandia National Laboratories
• Seismology application SPECFEM, Prof. Jeroen Tromp, Princeton University
• Plasma physics code XGC, Dr. C.S. Chang, Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory

For more information on the CAAR program, visit www.olcf.ornl.gov/caar.

Stay tuned for more coverage of this announcement tomorrow when we will present coverage of a panel about getting applications ready for next-generation leadership computing systems from the IDC User Forum. On the panel was Tjerk Straatsma, group leader for scientific computing at Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility.