Princeton Institute for Computational Science and Engineering (PICSciE) Talk

ABSTRACT: Modeling and simulation with petascale computing has supercharged the process of innovation, dramatically accelerating time-to-insight and time-to-discovery. The Titan supercomputer is the Department of Energy’s flagship Cray XK7 managed by the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF). With its hybrid, accelerated architecture of traditional CPUs and graphics processing units (GPUs), Titan allows advanced scientific applications to reach speeds exceeding 10 petaflops with a marginal increase in electrical power demand over the previous generation leadership-class supercomputer. I will summarize the lessons learned in deploying Titan and in preparing applications to move from conventional CPU architectures to a hybrid, accelerated architectures, with a focus on early science outcomes from Titan. We will discuss implications for the research community as we prepare for exascale computa-tional science and engineering within the next decade. I will also provide an overview of user programs at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility with specific information how researchers may apply for allocations of computing resources. Jack Wells is the Director of Science for the National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) with the rank of Distinguished R&D Scientist. He is responsible for devising the strategy to ensure cost-effective, state-of-the-art scientific computing at the NCCS, which hosts the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), a national user facility, and Titan, currently the faster supercomputer in the United States. Dr. Wells began his ORNL career in 1990 for resident research on his Ph.D. in Physics from Vanderbilt University. Following a three-year postdoctoral fellowship at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, he returned to ORNL as a staff scientist in 1997 as a Wigner fellow. Jack is an accomplished practitioner of computational physics and has been sponsored in his research by the Department of Energy’s Office of Basic Energy Sciences.