Departmental Colloquium
- Title
- The Road to Exascale Computing: Perspectives from a Computational Physicist
- Guest Speaker
- Dr. Ying Wai Li
- Guest Affiliation
- Oak Ridge National Laboratory
- Host
- Prof. David Landau
- When
- Thursday, February 15, 2018 3:30 pm - 4:30 pm
- Location
- Physics Auditorium (202)
- Details
- The next generation leadership-class high performance computer, Summit, will arrive at Oak Ridge National Laboratory by the end of the year of 2018. Summit is expected to deliver more than five times the computational performance of our current supercomputer, Titan. It will have a hybrid architecture, with each compute node containing multiple IBM POWER9 CPUs and NVIDIA Volta GPUs. As Summit brings us one step closer to Exascale computing, it will enable scientists to solve increasingly complex problems more efficiently. It will also provide opportunities to pioneer programming strategies and practices for high performance computing software development. What do these emerging technologies mean to physics and materials science research? What are the considerations when designing computer algorithms and developing scientific software to unleash the power of a gigantic computer like Summit? In this colloquium, I will share my experiences and insights on these questions, demonstrated through a few frontier research problems in computational physics and materials science.