ORNL Strengthens HPC Relations Overseas
Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Julia White recently got the opportunity to visit Japan to share the lab’s experience in hybrid computing and in allocating supercomputing time.
Julia White, INCITE program manager
White is the program manager for the Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE). She was one of several guest speakers invited to the 20th anniversary celebration of the University of Tsukuba’s National Center for Computational Sciences.
“The University of Tsukuba has a history of delivering HPC platforms using hybrid multicores,” said White.
Known as the “Science City,” Tsukuba is Japan’s hot spot for scientific and technological discoveries. It is home to the Appro Xtreme-X supercomputer, a hybrid system containing CPUs and GPUs with a peak performance of 802 teraflops.
Titan, which is the world’s largest hybrid system, was of particular interest to university officials. White briefed them on the Titan system and talked about what the OLCF is doing to prepare its users as well as the applications for the new resource.
Tsukuba senior members also asked White to share her experience allotting time spent on supercomputers to researchers.
Also offering assistance was fellow guest speaker Richard Kenway, chairman for the Scientific Steering Committee of the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe or PRACE—the national allocation program of the European Union. Together he and White sat down with their Japanese hosts and discussed their respective large supercomputing resources and the types of science achievements enabled through large grants of computer time.
“It was a wonderful opportunity, to have the US, Europe, and Japan all talking together, all sharing ideas about the practices and policies for national allocation programs,” White said.—by Jeremy Rumsey
