Engineering On The Edge

Hybrid supercomputers are opening new possibilities in research across the fields of science and engineering, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has launched a new conference to discuss the advances made possible by extreme-scale hybrid supercomputers. The Accelerating Computational Science Symposium 2012 will take place March 28-30 in Washington, D.C.

The new Titan supercomputer will replace Oak Ridge's existing Jaguar system (pictured).

The Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OCLF)  is co-hosting the event with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre.

“The symposium is motivated by society’s great need for advances in energy technologies and by the demonstrated achievements and tremendous potential for computational science and engineering,” said Jack Wells, director of science at the OCLF.  “Attendees will discuss how computational science on extreme-scale hybrid-computing architectures will advance research and development in this decade, increase our understanding of the natural world, accelerate innovation, and as a result, increase economic opportunity.”

Oak Ridge’s Titan supercomputer (a Cray XT5) is based on a hybrid architecture, which combines traditional CPUs with high-performance GPUs. Titan is expected to reach up to 20 petaflops this year, nearly double the performance of Japan’s K Computer, which was ranked as the most powerful supercomputer in the latest Top500 list.

Speakers at the event will include experts from Sandia National Laboratories, Princeton, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, the University of Illinois, and Stockholm University.