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| News |
| Institute for Advanced Architectures |
| New Joint Institute to Tackle Exascale Computing Challenges |
| In an effort to address the hardware and software challenges posed by exascale computing, Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) have founded the Institute for Advanced Architectures. The move to multi-core systems and the increased use of accelerators has necessitated such an Institute, according to Dr. Sudip Dosanjh, who is leading the project at SNL. While multi-core chips can perform more calculations, they are limited by the speed at which data move between processors and memory. |
| As the number of threads increases, and with multi-core systems running multiple threads, applications could potentially run hundreds of millions of threads on an exascale supercomputer. These unprecedented levels of scalability are driving advances in system software, tools, and algorithms. |
| "In order to continue to make progress in running scientific applications at these scales, we need to address our ability to maintain the balance between the hardware and the software," said Dr. Jeff Nichols, who is heading the Institute at ORNL. "There are huge software and programming challenges and our goal is to do the critical R&D to close some of the gaps." |
| Many scientific applications are currently limited by the speed memory can be accessed. To address this problem, the Institute sponsored the Memory Opportunities for High-Performance Computing workshop in January. The invitation-only meeting, originally planned for 25, had nearly 50 participants from national labs, DOE, the National Science Foundation, the National Security Agency, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), as well as leading manufacturers of processors and supercomputing systems. Fred Johnson from the DOE Office of Science and Bob Meisner from National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) served on the program committee. |
| The two labs intend to build on their long history of collaboration to foster a multidisciplinary approach by working with many industry and academic partners including SNL's Computer Science Research Institute and ORNL's relationships with the University of Tennessee-Knoxville and Georgia Tech University. |