Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility

Annual meeting explores simulations to address national priorities

More than 100 participants from government, industry, and academia attended the 2011 Computational Sciences and Engineering conference to discuss strategies for optimizing high- performance computing resources used in advanced modeling and simulation of grand challenges in energy. The conference, an annual event conceived in 2003 and hosted by ORNL’s Computing and Computational Sciences Directorate, took place Sept. 13-16 in Gatlinburg, Tenn. Presentations on the conference theme, “Virtualizing Energy,” covered energy topics including photovoltaics, small modular nuclear reactors, clean coal and gas technology, wind power, batteries, energy-efficient buildings, infrastructure, transportation, and the national power grid.

“The conference series provides an exceptional venue for presenting and discussing high-end computational science as well as the computer systems that support it,” said Buddy Bland, Director of Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF). At the OLCF, changes are taking place to upgrade the Jaguar supercomputer and transform it into Titan, a Cray XK6 system expected to perform up to 20 petaflops (quadrillion calculations per second) by 2013.

The 2012 event will be held September 5-7, at the Park Vista.

For more information on the conference, and a listing of presentations, please see http://computing.ornl.gov/workshops/FallCreek11/

—by Sandra Allen McLean