HPC News

They say everything’s bigger in Texas, and the 30^th anniversary of the annual International Conference of High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC18), held Nov. 11-16 in Dallas, did not disappoint. The conference, which broke records for attendees and exhibitors, saw Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) once again make its presence felt on the world’s biggest HPC stage.

On November 13, 2018, the high performance computing publication HPCwire awarded Lawrence Livermore Laboratory (LLNL) and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) their Editors’ Choice and Readers’ Choice Awards for the Top Supercomputing Achievement of 2018, recognizing the launch of the world’s two fastest computing systems.

Representatives from LLNL and ORNL accepted the awards for Sierra and Summit at the 2018 International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC18) conference in Dallas, Texas.

Sierra, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s (LLNL) newest supercomputer, rose to second place on the list of the world’s fastest computing systems, TOP500 List representatives announced November 12, 2018, at the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis conference (SC18) in Dallas.

The team participating in the latest study developed a way to improve their calculations of gA using an unconventional approach and supercomputers at ORNL and LLNL.

LLNL researchers are using HPC codes and systems to transform how engineers create complex parts with additive manufacturing technologies.

DOE Secretary Rick Perry announces the release of a request for proposals for development of new exascale supercomputers, including LLNL's El Capitan.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and the United Kingdom’s governing body for scientific research on Monday announced the signing of a new three-year agreement aimed at improving U.S. and U.K. industries through high performance computing, promoting research collaborations and boosting economic competitiveness in the two countries.

The Department of Energy’s (DOE) Advanced Manufacturing Office (AMO) today announced the funding of $1.87 million for seven new industry projects under an ongoing initiative designed to utilize DOE’s high-performance computing (HPC) resources and expertise to advance U.S. manufacturing and clean-energy technologies

An HPC for Manufacturing project aimed at saving time and money for paper product manufacturers earned an HPC Innovation Excellence Award at the 2017 SuperComputing Conference (SC17 (link is external)) in Denver on Nov. 14.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) researchers won two HPCwire Editor’s Choice awards for their work in applying high-performance computing (HPC) to solve complex challenges. The awards were presented at SC17 in Denver.

Assessing large magnitude (greater than 6 on the Richter scale) earthquake hazards on a regional (up to 100 kilometers) scale takes big machines. To resolve the frequencies important to engineering analysis of the built environment (up to 10 Hz or higher), numerical simulations of earthquake motions must be done on today's most powerful computers.

Normally, in a large-scale emergency, distributed energy resources (DERs) -- such as the energy produced by solar panels at customers' homes -- are shut off to protect the greater electrical grid. But a new project headed by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) aims to utilize these resources for restoration and recovery operations, boosting the grid's ability to bounce back from a blackout or cascading outage, and potentially reducing customer reconnection time to a matter of hours.

The U.S. Department of Energy's High Performance Computing for Manufacturing Program, designed to spur the use of national lab supercomputing resources and expertise to advance innovation in energy efficient manufacturing, is seeking a new round of proposals from industry to compete for $3 million.

In late 2017, IBM will begin delivery of Sierra, the latest in a series of leading-edge Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) Program supercomputers. Delivering peak speeds of up to 150 petaflops (10¹⁵ floating-point operations per second), Sierra is projected to provide at least four to six times the performance of Sequoia, Livermore’s current flagship supercomputer. To run efficiently on Sierra, applications must be modified to achieve a level of task division and coordination well beyond what previous systems demanded.

Two Penguin Computing systems installed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Quartz and Jade, were ranked 41st and 42nd on the TOP100 list of the world's fastest supercomputers. The announcement came during the SC16 supercomputing conference, held November 13–18, 2016, in Salt Lake City, Utah. The systems were procured under NNSA’s Tri-Laboratory Commodity Technology Systems program, or CTS-1, to bolster computing for national security at Los Alamos, Sandia, and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories.

A Lawrence Livermore team's dramatically improved first-principles molecular dynamics code that promises to enable new computer simulation applications was one of the finalists for the 2016 Gordon Bell Prize. The team presented its ground-breaking project at the 2016 supercomputing conference (SC16) held in Salt Lake City, Utah, November 12-18, 2016. "Modeling Dilute Solutions using First-Principles Molecular Dynamics: Computing more than a Million Atoms with over a Million Cores," was the title of the Livermore team's submission for the competition. Using a robust new algorithm, the Livermore team has developed an O(N)complexity solver for electronic structure problems with fully controllable numerical error.

Lawrence Livermore scientists are among those who have been awarded funding to develop software for the Department of Energy's Exascale Computing Project (link is external) (ECP). The ECP selected 35 software development proposals representing 25 research and academic organizations; Livermore computer scientists will lead six of the projects and are collaborators on another seven. The awards, totaling $34 million for the first year of funding, cover many components of the software stack for exascale systems.

The Department of Energy will invest $16 million over the next four years to accelerate the design of new materials through the use of supercomputers. Two four-year projects will take advantage of superfast computers at DOE national laboratories by developing software to design fundamentally new functional materials destined to revolutionize applications in alternative and renewable energy, electronics, and a wide range of other fields. Lawrence Livermore will use its Vulcan supercomputer to study transition metal-oxides with the goal of developing new theoretical methods and simulation capabilities for the predictive calculation of the properties of complicated materials for energy applications.

The full power of Lawrence Livermore’s Sequoia supercomputer played a key role in the Earth mantle convection simulation that won the 2015 Gordon Bell Prize, announced at SC15 Supercomputing Conference. LLNL’s onsite IBM analyst Roy Musselman and Livermore Computing’s Scott Futral were acknowledged for their contributions to the project in carrying out the Sequoia calculations.

Published in Proceedings of the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis. Earth simulation images courtesy of J. Rudi et al.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RFI) will combine decades of expertise to help American industry and businesses expand use of high performance computing (HPC) under a signed memorandum of understanding. Livermore and RPI will look to bridge the gap between the levels of computing conducted at their institutions and the typical levels found in industry. Scientific and engineering software applications capable of running on HPC platforms are a prime area of interest.