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Over the past seven years, under the Department of Energy, the Exascale Computing Project (ECP) has embarked on a journey, assembling teams of computational experts from various disciplines. Their collective mission was to propel the evolution of next-generation computing architectures, thereby instigating a paradigm shift in scientific simulation methodologies.
The ECP’s endeavours have been its close-knit alliance with the industrial supercomputing user community, an association realised through the industry and agency council. This Council has played a pivotal role in championing the cause of exascale research and development and in seamlessly integrating software technologies, applications, and hardware components, culminating in creating a fully-fledged exascale ecosystem.
For these visionary stakeholders, attaining exascale computing capability represents unlocking vast avenues for exploring promising new technologies and products. Moreover, it is a catalyst in hastening the journey towards commercialisation, expediting the transition from innovative ideas to market-ready solutions.
Dave Kepczynski, the Chief Information Officer at GE Research and a co-chair of ECP’s industry and agency council, expressed that exascale computing represents a substantial catalyst for technological advancements, productivity, engineering, and scientific pursuits.
Exascale computers stand as the most potent computing systems globally, boasting the capability to execute a quintillion operations per second, a magnitude exceeding petascale plans by a factor of 1,000 and outpacing the Department of Energy’s initial terascale computer from 1996 by a staggering 1 million times. Consequently, exascale computing introduces an unparalleled capacity for simulating intricate scientific phenomena with unprecedented realism and intricacy.
According to Dave Kepczynski, Chief Information Officer at GE Research and co-chair of ECP’s industry and agency council, exascale computing furnishes the velocity, scale, and precision required to facilitate the early design and development of innovative technologies, instilling high levels of confidence in digital engineering and simulation outcomes.
Within GE Research, exascale computing plays a pivotal role in aligning to drive technological innovation in diverse domains such as healthcare, energy, and aerospace, with exascale already contributing significantly to advancing cutting-edge aviation technologies.
Mohamed Ali, Vice President and General Manager of Engineering at GE Aerospace, emphasised that developing revolutionary aircraft engines necessitates groundbreaking technical prowess. Supercomputing technology enables GE Aerospace engineers to reshape the trajectory of aviation’s future by addressing challenges that were once deemed impossible.
Simulations of this kind are computational, demanding substantial processing time to depict the required duration and scales accurately. Thanks to Frontier, researchers can now, for the first time, conduct simulations of air movement and intricate flow features under full flight-scale conditions, unveiling previously inaccessible operational intricacies.
The Department of Energy (DOE) believes that the strategy for exascale development has enabled the DOE itself and provided valuable insights to the industry for enhancing its supercomputing capabilities to further its research objectives.
The leap in capability from petascale to exascale has become a reality through seemingly improbable advancements in computing technologies and the collective expertise of numerous individuals involved with ECI and ECP.
Dave Kepczynski expressed, “Witnessing supercomputing achieve this level of performance within a relatively short timeframe is truly remarkable.”
Consequently, exascale computing is inaugurating a new era in scientific exploration. In the future, ECP’s robust exascale computing ecosystem will have the potential to impact a multitude of industries. With sustained dedication to this critical capability, many scientific breakthroughs and cutting-edge technologies lie on the horizon, envisioning the boundless possibilities.
