Exascale Day Audio: Marianne Francois

Impact Area: National Security

Marianne Francois, Los Alamos National Laboratory

Transcript

I am Marianne Francois from Los Alamos National Laboratory. My background is in computational physics.

I lead the National Security Applications within the Exascale Computing Project. There are four projects within the portfolio. Each project addresses unique and complex multiphysics applications for the US Nuclear Security Enterprise. For the past five years, at each of the three National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) laboratories, large teams of computational physicists and computer scientists have worked together for countless hours to develop novel, agile, modular, and component-based software to solve tomorrow’s challenges on tomorrow’s exascale computers. Specifically, they have developed novel higher-order methods, multiphysics and multiscale algorithms, abstraction layers, and programming models and have integrated all of these components together to lead to much more powerful computational tools with increased flexibility and confidence than ever before. The new tools have already been demonstrated for portability and performance on the current NNSA computers (Trinity, Sierra and Astra). Please note that each of these platforms have their unique architecture and accelerator technology.

Now, we can’t wait for El Capitan to be here! El Capitan is the exascale system for the NNSA. With El Capitan and the newly developed computational tools, we will be able to solve much larger and complex problems not feasible five years ago. We are going to achieve much higher level of physics fidelity, resolution, accuracy, and efficiency than ever before. Further, the problems we are tackling are of importance for our national security and our nuclear deterrence. It is an exciting time!