WATCH: CCA Colloquium with Doug Kothe

Name: WATCH: CCA Colloquium with Doug Kothe
Start: 2019-01-25T14:30:00-05:00
End: 2019-01-25T15:30:00-05:00

Friday January 25, 2019

Title: Delivering on the Exascale Computing Project Mission for the U.S. Department of Energy

The vision of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Exascale Computing Project (ECP), initiated in 2016 as a formal DOE project executing through 2023, is to accelerate innovation with exascale simulation and data science solutions that enhance U.S. economic competitiveness, strengthen our national security, and change our quality of life. ECP’s mission is to deliver exascale-ready applications and solutions that address currently intractable problems of strategic importance and national interest; create and deploy an expanded and vertically integrated software stack on DOE HPC exascale and pre-exascale systems, thereby defining the enduring US exascale ecosystem; and leverage U.S. HPC vendor research activities and products into DOE HPC exascale systems. The project is a joint effort of two DOE programs: the Office of Science Advanced Scientific Computing Research Program and the National Nuclear Security Administration Advanced Simulation and Computing Program. ECP’s RD&D activities, which encompass the development of applications, software technologies, and hardware technologies and architectures, is carried out by over 100 small teams of scientists and engineers from the DOE national laboratories, universities, and industry. Illustrative examples will be given on how the ECP teams are delivering in its three areas of technical focus:

• Applications: Creating or enhancing the predictive capability of applications through algorithmic and software advances via co-design centers; targeted development of requirements-based models, algorithms, and methods; systematic improvement of exascale system readiness and utilization; and demonstration and assessment of effective software integration.

• Software Technologies: Developing and delivering a vertically integrated software stack containing advanced mathematical libraries, extreme-scale programming environments, development tools, visualization libraries, and the software infrastructure to support large-scale data management and data science for science and security applications.

• Hardware and Integration: Supporting U.S. HPC vendor R&D focused on innovative architectures for competitive exascale system designs; objectively evaluating hardware designs; deploying an integrated and continuously tested exascale software ecosystem at DOE HPC facilities; accelerating application readiness on targeted exascale architectures; and training on key ECP technologies to accelerate the software development cycle and optimize productivity of application and software developers.

About the Speaker

Douglas B. Kothe (Doug) has over three decades of experience in conducting and leading applied R&D in computational science applications designed to simulate complex physical phenomena in the energy, defense, and manufacturing sectors. Doug is currently the Director of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Exascale Computing Project (ECP). Prior to that, he was Deputy Associate Laboratory Director of the Computing and Computational Sciences Directorate (CCSD) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). Other prior positions for Doug at ORNL, where he has been since 2006, include Director of the Consortium for Advanced Simulation of Light Water Reactors, DOE’s first Energy Innovation Hub (2010-2015), and Director of Science at the National Center for Computational Sciences (2006-2010).

Before coming to ORNL, Doug spent 20 years at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he held a number of technical and line and program management positions, with a common theme being the development and application of modeling and simulation technologies targeting multi-physics phenomena characterized in part by the presence of compressible or incompressible interfacial fluid flow. Doug also spent one year at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the late 1980s as a physicist in defense sciences.

Doug holds a Bachelor in Science in Chemical Engineering from the University of Missouri – Columbia (1983) and a Masters in Science (1986) and Doctor of Philosophy (1987) in Nuclear Engineering from Purdue University.