Exascale Day 10.18.2021

Celebrating a new era in scientific discovery

Exascale computing will transform the ability to tackle some of the world’s most important challenges

Countdown to exascale celebration week October 18-22

While high-performance computing technology has evolved tremendously just during the life of the Exascale Computing Project [ECP], our project “team of teams”—composed of more than 1,000 researchers and scientists from across the United States—works not only with a sense of urgency but also with agility and a firm focus on mission. Achieving success requires that we adapt to newer technology advances, tackle an array of technical challenges, and implement new approaches for complex collaborative project management. We remain unrelenting in the pursuit of our ultimate objective—the effective co-design and co-dependency of applications, software, and hardware at unprecedented scale to form a robust, capable ‘used and useful’ exascale computing ecosystem. Such an ecosystem will be a foundational step in technology’s nonstop march to contribute to the improvement of the human condition. We are confident that ECP will occupy a unique place in history and will leave a legacy of tools, technologies, solutions, and perhaps most important—people—that will be impactful for decades. The project’s overarching heritage will be the remarkable magnitude of collaborative and integrative effort it brought to bear in accelerating the crossing of a computing threshold that will open new pathways of discovery and provide breakthrough solutions.

Doug Kothe, ORNL

Director

Exascale Computing Project

The architecture we put on the floor with Frontier is as equally capable at solving a big modeling and simulation program as it is at solving a big artificial intelligence program. Today with traditional modeling and simulation you can predict all kinds of physical phenomena that you see in the world around you: climate change, the path of hurricanes, new materials for more lightweight cars. You can build models from first principles equations, and you can solve them to high accuracy. But now, with machines like Frontier, you can build models from data . . . allowing us to use artificial intelligence to actually interrogate and inquire within those models and find predictive capabilities.

Jeff Nichols, ORNL/OLCF (future home of Frontier)

Associate Laboratory Director

Computing and Computational Sciences

This is not a destination as much as it’s a journey, and exascale is the next waypoint on this journey for ever-increasingly more powerful computers. With exascale, we’re going to have smarter AI and we’ll have higher resolution simulations, and it will impact nearly every technology-oriented problem we have, whether it’s climate, fluid dynamics, biology, materials or chemistry. All of this is going to get both a boost from the core compute in exascale, and then an extra boost from applying machine learning, opening up many possible paths for future deployment as well.

Rick Stevens, ANL (future home of Aurora)

Associate Laboratory Director

Computing, Environment and Life Sciences

The confluence of exascale computing and artificial intelligence will have a transformative impact on all of science. From discovery and design of new drugs to innovative materials and medical treatments, to quantum leaps in our ability to simulate largescale physical phenomena with microscopic high fidelity and accuracy—the impacts of our simulation capabilities will go far beyond anything we have experienced to date.

Chris Clouse, LLNL (future home of El Capitan)

Program Director

Weapon Simulation and Computing

Exascale computing is the capability to perform a billion billion (10¹⁸), or a quintillion, computing operations per second.

Crossing the exascale technology threshold will open new pathways of discovery and enable breakthrough solutions.

Join us here on Exascale Day, October 18

Learn about some of the many impact areas of exascale computing from the Department of Energy national laboratories, high-performance computing manufacturers, and leading universities and industrial organizations. For insightful videos, audio discussions, and articles, check back here beginning October 18.