Suzy Tichenor, OLCF HPC Industrial Partnerships Program Director, moderates the panel discussion “The Who—What—When of Getting Applications Ready to Run On, and Across, Office of Science Next-Gen Leadership Computing System” at the IDC HPC User Forum last month in Norfork, VA. Tjerk Straatsma, right, team leader for the Scientific Computing Group at OLCF, announced the OLCF’s 13 CAAR Programs at the forum.
Timing, topics line up as proper venue for announcement
Tjerk Straatsma, team leader for the Scientific Computing Group at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), recently announced the 13 projects selected for OLCF’s Center for Accelerated Application Readiness (CAAR) Program.
During the International Data Corporation’s (IDC’s) High-Performance Computing (HPC) User Forum in Norfolk, Virginia, on April 15, Straatsma was a member of a panel discussion titled “The Who—What—When of Getting Applications Ready to Run On, and Across, Office of Science Next-Gen Leadership Computing Systems.” Suzy Tichenor, HPC Industrial Partnerships Program director at the US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), moderated the panel. The forum served as the ideal backdrop for a number of reasons for the announcement from the OLCF, a DOE Office of Science User Facility.
“This was a good opportunity to make the CAAR announcement,” Straatsma said. “Our topic was timely. Also, the members of the panel actually had the opportunity to take a number of questions on the whole concept of portability.”
Added Tichenor: “One of the goals for the HPC User Forum is to deliver current, cutting-edge information. The steering committee was very interested in learning about application acceleration in light of the announcements of the new systems at the national laboratories.”
Straatsma talked in detail about each of the 13 CAAR projects (details of which were posted to the OLCF website after his announcement). He was joined on the panel by Katie Antypas of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center and Tim Williams of the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility. Each spoke and then fielded questions from the panel moderator and audience.
“This was a very good venue to educate the HPC community on the steps DOE is taking to prepare key science and engineering applications for its next generation HPC systems,” Tichenor said. “This makes a strong statement that DOE is firmly committed to ensuring that researchers will be able to run important codes when these new leadership systems arrive.”
Straatsma agreed, noting, “The next step, for us, will be to collaborate on applications we share and how we’ll help others make progress as they get access to our resources to test portability.”
HPCwire filmed the panel’s presentations and later posted each talk individually on its website, leading with Straatsma’s CAAR announcement.
The OLCF’s presence at the IDC HPC User Forum has been a strong one in recent years.
“Our relationship is both multi-layered and multi-faceted,” said Tichenor, who serves on the forum steering committee. “We’ve had members serve on the forum steering committee, as speakers, and as attendees. It gives us the opportunity to reach the broader community about what’s going on at the OLCF.”
Further, OLCF users, such as General Electric’s Masako Yamada and the Consortium for Advanced Simulation of Light Water Reactors, have been recipients of the IDC HPC Innovation Award. “This reflects the high impact research that is going on at the OLCF,” she said.
The HPC User Forum is a group of technical and business executives across a broad spectrum of HPC users, suppliers, and academic and government HPC centers that meet several times a year in the United States and abroad to discuss the latest trends in HPC applications, technologies, innovations, and discoveries resulting from HPC usage.
For more information on the IDC HPC User Forum, please visit: https://hpcuserforum.com/events.html.
Straatsma’s presentation is available at: https://www.hpcwire.com/2015/04/16/application-readiness-in-full-swing-at-doe-labs-part-i/.
Oak Ridge National Laboratory is supported by the US Department of Energy’s Office of Science. The single largest 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, please visit science.energy.gov.
