News Brief: Maximizing the potential of exascale computing

March 15, 2017

• Susan Bauer, PNNL, (509) 372-6083

RICHLAND, Wash. - Advances in science require vast computational resources. Next generation supercomputers will help create a smart power grid and enable breakthroughs like reconstructing microbiomes, designing chemicals or materials at the molecular level, and modeling and simulating weather and data for climate research.

Breakthroughs and innovations in these and other fields will depend on exascale computing systems, being designed now to be at least 50 times faster than the nation's most powerful supercomputers in use today.

To be prepared to take full advantage of exascale systems, researchers are collaboratively participating in developing the software ecosystems, the hardware technology and a new generation of computational science applications, referred to as the co-design process.

The D.O.E.'s Pacific Northwest National Lab has been chosen to lead an Exascale Computing Plan co-design center focused on graph analytics. Researchers will develop methods and techniques for efficient implementation of key combinatorial algorithms chosen from the 4 areas: smart grids, computational biology, computational chemistry and climate science. The methods and techniques will be captured in a unified software framework called ExaGraph, that targets future extreme scale computing.

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Sandia National Labs and Purdue University are partners in the Exagraph: Combinatorial Methods for Enabling Exascale applications co-design center, led by Mahantesh Halappanavar a senior research scientist at PNNL.

Tags: Computational Science, Supercomputer

Interdisciplinary teams at Pacific Northwest National Lab address many of America's most pressing issues in energy, the environment and national security through advances in basic and applied science. Founded in 1965, PNNL employs 4,400 staff and has an yearly budget of nearly $1 billion. It is managed by Battelle for the D.O.E.'s Office of Science. As the single biggest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, the Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information on PNNL, visit the PNNL News Center, or follow PNNL on Facebook, Google+, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter.

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