PathForward Vendors Weigh In on Funding Announcement

06/15/17

Department of Energy Awards Six Research Contracts Totaling

$258 Million to Accelerate U.S. Supercomputing Technology

QUOTES FROM VENDORS RECEIVING AWARDS

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD)

Sunnyvale, California

“AMD is excited to extend its long-term computing partnership with the U.S. Government in its PathForward program for exascale computing. We are thrilled to see AMD’s unique blend of high-performance computing and graphics technologies drive the industry forward and enable breakthroughs like exascale computing. This technology collaboration will drive outstanding performance and power-efficiency on applications ranging from scientific computing to machine learning and data analytics. As part of PathForward, AMD will explore processors, memory architectures, and high-speed interconnects to improve the performance, power-efficiency, and programmability of exascale systems. This effort emphasizes an open, standards-based approach to heterogeneous computing as well as co-design with the Exascale Computing Project (ECP) teams to foster innovation and achieve the Department of Energy’s goals for capable exascale systems.”

— Dr. Lisa Su, president and CEO

Cray Inc. (CRAY)

Seattle, Washington

“At Cray, our focus is on innovation and advancing supercomputing technologies that allow customers to solve their most demanding scientific, engineering, and data-intensive problems. We are honored to play an important role in the Department of Energy’s Exascale Computing Project, as we collaboratively explore new advances in system and node technology and architectures. By pursuing improvements in sustained performance, power efficiency, scalability, and reliability, the ECP’s PathForward program will help make significant advancements towards exascale computing.”

— Peter Ungaro, president and CEO

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE)

Palo Alto, California

“The U.S. Department of Energy has selected HPE to rethink the fundamental architecture of supercomputers to make exascale computing a reality. This is strong validation of our vision, strategy and execution capabilities as a systems company with deep expertise in Memory-Driven Computing, VLSI, photonics, non-volatile memory, software and systems design. Once operational, these systems will help our customers to accelerate research and development in science and technology.”

— Mike Vildibill, vice president, Advanced Technology Programs

Intel Corp. (INTEL)

Santa Clara, California

“Intel is investing to offer a balanced portfolio of products for high performance computing that are essential to not only achieving Exascale class computing, but also to drive breakthrough capability across the entire ecosystem. This research with the US Department of Energy focused on advanced computing and I/O technologies will accelerate the deployment of leading HPC solutions that contribute to scientific discovery for economic and societal benefits for the United States and people around the world. These gains will impact many application domains and be realized in traditional high performance simulations as well as data analytics and the rapidly growing field of artificial intelligence.”

— Al Gara, Intel Fellow, Data Center Group Chief Architect, Exascale Systems

International Business Machines (IBM)

Armonk, New York

“IBM has a roadmap for future Data Centric Systems to deliver enterprise-strength cloud services and on-premise mission-critical application performance for our customers. We are excited to once again work with the DOE and we believe the PathForward program will help accelerate our capabilities to deliver cognitive, flexible, cost-effective and energy efficient exascale-class systems for a wide variety of important workloads.”

— Michael Rosenfield, vice president of Data Centric Solutions, IBM Research

NVIDIA Corp. (NVIDIA)

Santa Clara, California

“NVIDIA has been researching and developing faster, more efficient GPUs for high performance computing (HPC) for more than a decade. This is our sixth DOE research and development contract, which will help accelerate our efforts to develop highly efficient throughput computing technologies to ensure U.S. leadership in HPC. Our R&D will focus on critical areas including energy-efficient GPU architectures and resilience. We’re particularly proud of the work we’ve been doing to help the DOE achieve exascale performance at a fraction of the power of traditional compute architectures.”

— Dr. Bill Dally, chief scientist and senior vice president of research