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OLCF technology articles.

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Ready for Science: Summit Completes System Acceptance

A year-long acceptance process for the 200-petaflop, IBM AC922 Summit supercomputer at the US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is complete. Acceptance testing ensures that the supercomputer and its file system meet the functionality, performance, and stability requirements agreed upon by the facility and the vendor. To…
Katie Elyce Jones
December 20, 2018
Technology

Summit Speeds Calculations in the Search for Exotic Particles

In pursuit of numerical predictions for exotic particles, researchers are simulating atom-building quark and gluon particles over 70 times faster on Summit, the world’s most powerful scientific supercomputer, than on its predecessor Titan at the US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). The interactions of quarks and…
Katie Elyce Jones
September 17, 2018
Technology

OLCF Welcomes Wombat Test System

Concocting the next big thing in high-performance computing (HPC) often starts with giving the latest thing a try. In that spirit, the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) recently deployed Wombat, the center’s newest Arm-based test bed. The 16-node, single-rack computing cluster is the OLCF’s latest foray into Arm technology,…
Jonathan Hines
August 7, 2018
Technology

ORNL’s Summit Supercomputer Named World’s Fastest

OAK RIDGE, Tenn.  – The US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory is once again officially home to the fastest supercomputer in the world, according to the TOP500 List, a semiannual ranking of the world’s fastest computing systems. The recently launched Summit supercomputer was announced as No. 1 today…
Jonathan Hines
June 25, 2018
Technology

Summit by the Numbers

Download the high-resolution file. The US Department of Energy’s Summit supercomputer located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory enables scientists to simulate complex physical systems and make predictions critical to advancing research and development. Summit’s “smart” architecture merges GPU acceleration and dense local memory to support expanding applications in data science…
Katie Elyce Jones
June 8, 2018
Technology

Genomics Code Exceeds Exaops on Summit Supercomputer

Researchers at the US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory broke the exascale barrier, achieving a peak throughput of 1.88 exaops—faster than any previously reported science application—while analyzing genomic data on the recently launched Summit supercomputer. The ORNL team achieved the feat, the equivalent to carrying out nearly 2…
Jonathan Hines
June 8, 2018
ADIOS and BDE researchers have incorporated a new methodology into the integrated tool that allows users to compress and stream data in real time. The new approach leverages software-defining network capabilities, allowing users to control network resources rather than manually requesting to connect.Technology

ADIOS and BigData Express Offer New Data Streaming Capabilities

ADIOS and BDE researchers have incorporated a new methodology into the integrated tool that allows users to compress and stream data in real time. The new approach leverages software-defining network capabilities, allowing users to control network resources rather than manually requesting to connect. Projects large enough to run on high-performance…
Rachel McDowell
May 29, 2018
Technology

New Discoveries Within ‘SIGHT’

SIGHT visualization from a project led by University of Virginia’s Leonid Zhigilei to explore how lasers transform metal surface. At the home of America’s most powerful supercomputer, the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), researchers often simulate millions or billions of dynamic atoms to study complex problems in science and…
Katie Elyce Jones
February 7, 2018
Technology

OLCF Launches New Website

The Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility’s (OLCF’s) website serves not only as the home for news on scientific discovery occurring at the supercomputing center but also as a gateway for system users to access information critical to the success of their projects. This month, the OLCF, a US Department of…
Josh Cunningham
February 7, 2018
Technology

Optimizing Miniapps for Better Portability

Minisweep performs a “sweep” computation across a grid (pictured)—representative of a 3D volume in space—to calculate the positions, energies, and flows of neutrons in a nuclear reactor. The yellow cube marks the beginning location of the sweep. The green cubes are dependent upon information from the yellow cube, the blue…
Rachel McDowell
January 17, 2018
Technology

OLCF Testing New Platform for Scientific Workflows

OpenShift is an open source container application platform by Red Hat based on top of Docker containers and the Kubernetes container cluster manager for enterprise app development and deployment. Scientific progress increasingly is driven by data—along with the instruments that produce it, the networks that move it, the systems that…
Jonathan Hines
June 5, 2017
Technology

OLCF Explores Deep Learning with DGX-1

The Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) recently deployed a new NVIDIA DGX‑1 artificial intelligence supercomputer era offer scientists and researchers opportunities to delve into deep learning technologies with more vigor than ever before. Deep learning uses neural networks to classify data or predict outcomes by training models on large data…
Rachel McDowell
June 5, 2017
Technology

Containers Provide Access to Deep Learning Frameworks

Adam Simpson (front) and Matt Belhorn (back), high-performance computing user support specialists at the OLCF, use the Singularity application to develop containers that will allow newer systems to run deep learning packages. Deep learning is emerging as a powerful branch of machine learning that uses artificial neural networks to help…
Rachel McDowell
May 9, 2017
Technology

Chemistry Applications Get in Top Shape for Summit

OLCF computational scientist Dmitry Liakh, left, and performance analyst Frank Winkler display a visual analysis of the improved runtime performance of a numerical tensor algebra library that can be used by chemistry applications on Summit, the OLCF’s next leadership computing system. Preparing for a new supercomputer at the Oak Ridge…
Katie Elyce Jones
April 18, 2017
Technology

Test System Arms OLCF with Experimental Technology

The Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) is now equipped with ARM1, a new test bed for the ARM architecture and its power-efficient processors. As an early development system, ARM1 gives researchers the opportunity to test various software packages and explore an experimental environment for ARM architecture–based systems. Because ARM…
Rachel McDowell
April 18, 2017
Technology

Multitasking Framework Accelerates Scientific Discovery

A visualization of the active site of the enzyme dihydrofolate reductase. OLCF staff worked with ORNL computational scientist Pratul Agarwal to integrate functional partitioning into his AMBER code, which he uses to sample rare conformations of proteins and enzymes. With FP, Agarwal can configure AMBER to analyze conformations on available…
Jonathan Hines
March 28, 2017
Technology

Ascending to Summit: Announcing Summitdev

Since having partnered with IBM, NVIDIA, and Mellanox in 2014, the US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has been forging the path to its next big supercomputer, Summit, which will feature an IBM POWER9 architecture and NVIDIA Volta GPUs. Scheduled to enter full production in 2019, Summit will allow researchers to dive…
Rachel McDowell
February 28, 2017