Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) are leading providers of large scale computational resources for the scientific community and have made substantial investments to deploy large-scale computing platforms based on current and emerging accelerator technologies.  Our group of laboratories believes that hybrid multicore architectures hold a significant, yet unrealized promise for delivering high-end production computing capabilities for the most demanding scientific applications. Therefore our labs have teamed with some of the leading universities in the area of architecture and software research for hybrid multicore: the Georgia Institute of Technology and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH). Jointly we have formed the Hybrid Multicore Consortium (HMC).

While there is general agreement that hybrid multicore technologies will be a critical component in future high-end computing systems, most applications will require a significant re-engineering effort to take advantage of the resources provided by these systems. The goal of HMC is to  address the migration of existing applications to accelerator based systems and thereby maximize the investments in these systems. The main focus is on identifying obstacles to making emerging, large-scale systems based on accelerator technologies production-ready for high-end scientific calculations.  While the consortium will maintain a long-term perspective (hybrid multicore systems), the initial focus is on overcoming the obstacles associated with near term systems.  The long-term goal is to advance the state-of-the-art and application of hybrid multicore computing capabilities to current and future integrated applications. The consortium will facilitate the sharing of best practices and the development of the processes and technologies needed to support accelerator based platforms. Membership is open to the public.