HPC News

COVID-19 HPC Consortium Reflects on Past Year
COVID-19 HPC Consortium scientists and stakeholders met virtually on March 23 to mark the consortium’s one-year anniversary.

Research Uncovers Missing Physics in Explosive Hotspots
Molecular dynamics simulations predict that more potential energy is localized in hotspots than their kinetic energy (or temperature) would suggest. Excess potential energy is tied to persistent strained molecular states that are primed for chemical reactions and explain why hotspots react faster than the bulk.

Livermore Converges a Slew of New Ideas for Exascale Storage
Molecular dynamics simulations predict that more potential energy is localized in hotspots than their kinetic energy (or temperature) would suggest. Excess potential energy is tied to persistent strained molecular states that are primed for chemical reactions and explain why hotspots react faster than the bulk.

Livermore’s El Capitan Supercomputer to Debut HPE Rabbit ‘Near-Node’ Storage
A near-node local storage innovation called Rabbit factored heavily into Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s decision to select Cray’s proposal for its CORAL-2 machine, the lab’s first exascale-class supercomputer, El Capitan.

LLNL’s de Supinski earns prestigious IEEE Fellowship
IEEE, the world's largest technical professional organization, announced it has elevated Bronis de Supinski to the rank of fellow, recognizing LLNL's Livermore Computing chief technology officer (CTO) for his leadership in the design and use of large-scale computing systems.

Blazing the Trail for Exascale Storage
To get a sense of the size and scope of the storage systems in use at Lawrence Livermore, we had a long conversation recently with Robin Goldstone, HPC strategist in the Advanced Technologies Office at Lawrence Livermore.

Lab stands tall on bi-annual list of Top500 supercomputers
Sierra was one of six Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory supercomputers to make the latest TOP500 List of the most-powerful supercomputers in the world. Sierra held on to the No. 3 spot, achieving 94.6 petaFLOPs on the High Performance LINPACK (HPL) benchmark. LLNL’s presence was bolstered by the addition of Ruby, a recently announced computing cluster that hit 3.7 petaFLOPs on the HPL, ranking it No. 80 in the world.

LLNL welcomes 'Ruby' supercomputer for NNSA mission and COVID-19 research
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s newest supercomputer, Ruby, a 6 petaFLOP Intel Xeon Platinum-based cluster, will be used for unclassified programmatic work in support of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s stockpile stewardship mission, open science and the search for therapeutic drugs and designer antibodies against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

Spack packs a development boost for top supercomputers
Spack is now the deployment mechanism for the world’s top supercomputer with its Arm base, Fugaku, and has been and 1300 packages on the Summit machine were handled by Spack. It is expected to get further momentum with the future exascale systems as well.

What Put LLNL at the Center of U.S. Supercomputing in 2020?
Lawrence Livermore National Lab has been at the forefront of newer architectures over the last year in particular across multiple systems: Mammoth, expanded Corona, Lassen with Cerebras chip, and Ruby, a top 100-class all CPU (Intel Platinum) super.

At the OpenMP Forefront
Listen to what’s coming in OpenMP 5.1 and beyond, how the C++ ecosystem is evolving, why Python in HPC, and have fun as these two razz each other.

Department of Energy to showcase scientific computational expertise at SC20
The scientific computing and networking leadership of 17 Department of Energy (DOE) national laboratories will be showcased at SC20, the International Conference for High-Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis, taking place Nov. 9-19 for the first time via a completely virtual format.

Mammoth computing cluster to aid COVID research
Funded by the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act, Lawrence Livermore's new 'big memory' performance computing cluster, Mammoth, will be used to perform genomics analysis, nontraditional simulations and graph analytics required by scientists working on COVID-19, including the development of antiviral drugs and designer antibodies.
https://www.llnl.gov/news/mammoth-computing-cluster-aid-covid-research

Girls persevere for STEM in virtual conference
The San Joaquin Expanding Your Horizon’s Conference went virtual for the first time in its 28-year history. Pictured, LC's John Gyllenhaal presents The Magic of STEM workshop.

AI gets a boost via LLNL, SambaNova collaboration
LLNL has installed a new artificial intelligence accelerator from SambaNova Systems into the Corona supercomputing cluster, allowing Lab researchers to run scientific simulations for inertial confinement fusion, COVID-19 and other basic science, while offloading AI calculations from those simulations to the AI system.

Corona Supercomputer Gets Funding for COVID-19 Work
Funding by the CARES Act enabled LLNL and industry partners to more than double the speed of the Corona supercomputing cluster to in excess of 11 petaFLOPS of peak performance.

LLNL team solves 100-year-old metallurgy puzzle
To understand exactly how metals respond to high-rate compression in molecular dynamics simulations, LLNL scientists use novel methods of in silico microscopy to reveal defects in the crystal lattice (green and red line objects and gray surface objects at the top) while removing all the atoms (yellow balls at the bottom) for clarity.

LLNL to provide supercomputing resources to universities
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) will provide significant computing resources to students and faculty from nine universities that were newly selected for participation in the NNSA’s Predictive Science Academic Alliance Program (PSAAP).

Summit on Summit, Sierra, and Perlmutter Year 2
When it comes to solving complex technical issues for GPU-accelerated supercomputers, the national labs have found that tackling them is “better together”

Spack: a Package Manager for Supercomputers, a Podcast
An interview with Todd Gamblin from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory about the Spack project, discussing his current research project along with his involvement in Spack.