The US Department of Energy (DOE) will invest $32 million over the next four years to accelerate the design of new materials through use of supercomputers. Seven projects will be supported, three led by teams at DOE National Laboratories and four by Universities. The teams are led by Argonne National... Read more →

In a step toward advancing small modular nuclear reactor designs, scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory have run reactor simulations on ORNL supercomputer Summit with greater-than-expected computational efficiency. The team’s experiments tracked 100 billion particle histories—which are collections of unique, individual neutron interactions that occur within a reactor core—on Summit’s... Read more →

The US Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory is launching a four-year, $3.2-million project to develop software that will bring the power of exascale computers to the computational study and design of catalytic materials. Ames Laboratory scientist Mark Gordon, also the Francis M. Craig Distinguished Professor of Chemistry at Iowa State... Read more →

The US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory unveiled Summit as the world’s most powerful and smartest scientific supercomputer. With a peak performance of 200,000 trillion calculations per second (200 petaflops), Summit will be eight times more powerful than ORNL’s previous top-ranked system, Titan. For certain scientific applications, Summit... Read more →

A new earth modeling system will support weather-scale resolution and use advanced computers to simulate aspects of Earth’s variability and anticipate decadal changes that will impact the US energy sector in coming years. After four years of development, the Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM) is being released to the... Read more →

US Secretary of Energy Rick Perry announced a new Department of Energy Request for Proposals (RFP), potentially worth up to $1.8 billion, for the development of at least two new exascale supercomputers—and possibly three—to be deployed at DOE National Laboratories in the 2021-2023 timeframe. The new supercomputers funded through this... Read more →

The Department of Energy’s Exascale Computing Project (ECP) announced its first round of funding with the selection of 15 application development proposals for full funding and seven proposals for seed funding, representing teams from 45 research and academic organizations. The awards, totaling $39.8 million, target advanced modeling and simulation solutions... Read more →

The US Department of Energy will invest $16 million over the next four years to accelerate the design of new materials through use of supercomputers. Two four-year projects—one team led by DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), the other team led by DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL)—will leverage... Read more →

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) will receive a first-of-a-kind brain-inspired supercomputing platform for deep learning developed by IBM Research. Based on a breakthrough neurosynaptic computer chip called IBM TrueNorth (earlier post), the scalable platform will process the equivalent of 16 million neurons and 4 billion synapses and consume the energy... Read more →

The National Science Foundation will provide $2.42 million to develop a unique facility for refining complex, physics-based computer models with big data techniques at the University of Michigan. The university will provide an additional $1.04 million. The focal point of the project will be a new computing resource, called ConFlux,... Read more →

President Obama issued an Executive Order establishing the National Strategic Computing Initiative (NSCI). The NSCI is a whole-of-government effort designed to create a cohesive, multi-agency strategic vision and Federal investment strategy, executed in collaboration with industry and academia, to maximize the benefits of high-performance computing (HPC) for the United States.... Read more →

Intel Corporation and Micron Technology, Inc. unveiled 3D XPoint technology, a non-volatile memory that has the potential to revolutionize any device, application or service that benefits from fast access to large sets of data. Now in production, 3D XPoint technology is a major breakthrough in memory process technology and the... Read more →

Argonne scientists have used the Mira supercomputer to identify and to improve a new mechanism for eliminating friction, which fed into the development of a hybrid material that exhibited superlubricity—a state in which friction essentially disappears—at the macroscale—i.e., at engineering scale—for the first time. A paper on their work was... Read more →

RAPTOR, a turbulent combustion code developed by Sandia National Laboratories mechanical engineer Dr. Joseph Oefelein, was selected as one of 13 partnership projects for the Center for Accelerated Application Readiness (CAAR). CAAR is a US Department of Energy program located at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility and is focused... Read more →

Scientists at Rice University and the University of Minnesota recently identified, through a large-scale, multi-step computational screening process, promising zeolite structures for two fuel applications: purification of ​ethanol from fermentation broths and the hydroisomerization of alkanes with 18–30 carbon atoms encountered in petroleum refining. (Earlier post.) To date, more than... Read more →

Under the joint Collaboration of Oak Ridge, Argonne, and Lawrence Livermore (CORAL) initiative, the US Department of Energy (DOE) will invest $200 million to deliver a next-generation supercomputer—Aurora—to the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF). When commissioned in 2018, this supercomputer will be open to all scientific users. The new system,... Read more →

Scientists at IBM, under DARPA’s Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics (SyNAPSE) program, have developed one of the world’s largest and most complex computer chips ever produced—one whose architecture is inspired by the neuronal structure of the brain and requires only a fraction of the electrical power of conventional... Read more →

Cray XC30. Click to enlarge. Cray Inc. launched its next-generation high-end supercomputing system: the Cray XC30 supercomputer. Previously code-named “Cascade,” the Cray XC30 supercomputer combines the new Aries interconnect, Intel Xeon processors, Cray’s fully-integrated software environment, and innovative power and cooling technologies to create a production supercomputer that is designed... Read more →

Increasing complexity of vehicle design is driving the need for better simulation and more powerful computers. Wagner and Pannala. Click to enlarge. The complexity of new and future vehicles—driven by the need for increasing fuel efficiency and decreasing emissions with ever-changing drive-cycle demands and environmental conditions—is adding unprecedented flexibility in... Read more →

Under an initiative called FastForward, the Department of Energy (DOE), Office of Science and the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) have awarded $62.5 million in research and development (R&D) contracts to five leading companies in high performance computing to accelerate the development of next-generation exascale supercomputers critical for national defense,... Read more →