Audio Update: Application Development Research Focus Area

Andrew Siegel, ECP director of Application Development

The status of the testing of ECP applications on the Summit system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and the success and impact of the co-design centers are among the subjects of an audio update from Andrew Siegel, director of ECP’s Application Development (AD) research focus area.

Discussion Points

• We’re already seeing very good early results on Summit for a few applications. Summit is in the early stages of testing at ORNL, and ECP applications for nuclear energy, computational cosmology, and fusion have run large test problems with excellent results. A scaled-down version of Summit, summit_dev, is available more broadly on a per-request basis.
• The co-design center approach has been very successful and has had significant impact on application projects. Adaptive mesh refinement in AMRex (Co-Design Center for Block-Structured AMR) and higher-order unstructured meshes in CEED (Center for Efficient Exascale Discretizations) are being broadly adopted and deeply integrated in application projects. CODAR (Co-Design Center for Online Data Analysis and Reduction) is developing data compression tools for which there is great interest across a wide range of applications, and the COPA (Co-Design Center for Particle Applications) project has been doing work on FFTs (fast Fourier transforms) that have led to a new stand-alone effort in building a more general exascale FFT effort.
• Co-design success and the use of machine learning across projects has led us to explore standing up a new machine learning co-design center, possibly as early as 2018. Plans are being developed and will be presented at the end of the month.