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OLCF technology articles.

exascale obstaclesScienceTechnology

Exascale Computing’s Four Biggest Challenges and How They Were Overcome

In 2008, the Exascale Study Group (ESG) issued a report, Technology Challenges in Achieving Exascale Systems, sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. It concluded that exascale supercomputers faced four major obstacles—power consumption, data movement, fault tolerance, and extreme parallelism—“where current technology trends are simply insufficient, and significant new…
Coury Turczyn
October 18, 2021
Technology

Benchmarking Mixed-Precision Performance

Today at ISC High Performance 2021, a European virtual conference for high-performance computing (HPC), the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility’s (OLCF’s) Summit was ranked as the world’s second-fastest supercomputer in the 57th TOP500 list. But it also took second place in a relatively new benchmark test apart from the main…
Coury Turczyn
June 28, 2021
Codeplay LogoTechnology

Argonne and Oak Ridge National Laboratories Award Codeplay Software to Further Strengthen SYCL™ Support

LEMONT, IL, and OAK RIDGE, TN, and EDINBURGH, UK, June 17, 2021 - Argonne National Laboratory (Argonne) in collaboration with Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), has awarded Codeplay a contract implementing the oneAPI DPC++ compiler, an implementation of the SYCL open standard software, to support AMD GPU-based high-performance compute (HPC) supercomputers.…
Katie Bethea
June 17, 2021
EventsTechnology

Spock and HIP Seminars Look Forward to Supercomputing’s Near Future

As the world of high-performance computing (HPC) marches ever closer to entering the exascale era of supercomputers exceeding a billion billion, or 1018, floating point operations per second, anticipation among computational scientists is palpable—even during virtual workshops. Two recent seminars copresented by AMD, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), which now incorporates…
Coury Turczyn
June 14, 2021
Technology

Building a Better Compiler

Using the Summit supercomputer at the US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), researchers from the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute (ISI) have made significant progress toward achieving a major goal in scientific high-performance computing (HPC): creating a compiler to more easily port complex science…
Coury Turczyn
June 11, 2021
Technology

OLCF Announces Storage Specifications for Frontier Exascale System

A newly enhanced I/O subsystem will support the nation’s first exascale supercomputer and the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), a US Department of Energy high-performance computing user facility. The OLCF announced storage specifications for their pioneering HPE Cray Frontier supercomputer, an exascale-class system set to power up by year’s…
Matt Lakin
May 20, 2021
cybersecurityTechnology

NCCS Introduces CITADEL Security Framework

The National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) at the US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has unveiled CITADEL, a new framework of security protocols that will enable researchers to harness the NCCS’s supercomputers for open-science projects using protected data Although ORNL has a long history of…
Coury Turczyn
May 6, 2021
NCRC teamTechnology

DOE and NOAA Extend Strategic Partnership

The US Department of Energy (DOE) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have formally agreed to renew their strategic partnership to run and manage the National Climate-Computing Research Center (NCRC). For the past decade, the NCRC has provided a supercomputer platform for NOAA scientists to define the leading…
Coury Turczyn
January 12, 2021
Technology

Jupyter Has Landed at the OLCF

To analyze and process scientific data, researchers often employ Jupyter notebooks, interactive web documents that host snippets of code written in statistical programming languages such as Python (or R or Julia). Domain scientists, mathematicians, data scientists, and educators use the Jupyter tool suite to analyze and visualize data, iteratively prototype codes,…
Rachel McDowell
December 22, 2020
Frontier data center constructionOLCF HistoryTechnology

Building an Exascale-Class Data Center

When the US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) new exascale supercomputer, Frontier, completes installation at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in 2021, it will later debut as a landmark in high-performance computing with groundbreaking performance of greater than 1.5 exaflops (one quintillion floating-point operations per second). But right now—long before Frontier’s…
Coury Turczyn
December 14, 2020
Technology

OLCF Reaches New Heights with Andes Cluster

Staff members at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) have replaced the center’s Rhea data analysis cluster with a brand-new AMD-based system dubbed Andes. For 6 faithful years, Rhea afforded OLCF users the opportunity to perform data analysis and visualizations of simulations performed on the OLCF’s former Cray XK7…
Rachel McDowell
December 11, 2020
Data visualizationTechnology

VISTA: ORNL’s Visual Informatics for Science and Technology Advances Lab

The Computing and Computational Sciences Directorate is home to VISTA: ORNL's Visual Informatics for Science and Technology Advances (VISTA) Lab. The mission of VISTA is to improve domain experts’ ability to explore large and complex data through the development and application of interactive data visualization and analysis systems. By acting as a bridge connecting…
Katie Bethea
December 8, 2020
Technology

Data Matters: Scientific Data Management Tool Improves Labeling, Information Sharing for OLCF Researchers

This story is the fourth in a series called “Data Matters,” a collection of features dedicated to exploring the relevance of data for scientific advancement and exploration at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, across Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and beyond. The increasingly collaborative nature of scientific research has established…
Andrea Schneibel
November 19, 2020
Technology

OLCF Launches New User Portal, myOLCF

In the past, users of the supercomputing resources at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) have accessed information about their computing projects through a static portal that provides metrics and statistics upon login. Although this information is helpful from a reporting perspective, users have been unable to control certain…
Rachel McDowell
November 10, 2020
Technology

The Greenest Option: Finding New Homes for Old Machines

As head of the High-Performance Computing (HPC) Infrastructure Operations Group in the National Center for Computational Science (NCCS) at the US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Paul Abston does not like to see government investments in technology go to waste. Even more so, he is highly…
Coury Turczyn
October 28, 2020