The PASC25 Organizing Team is excited to start the year with the announcement of one of this year’s program highlights: the keynote lecture “Fulfilling the Promise of the World’s First Exascale Supercomputer: Science on Frontier.” Professor Bronson Messer will offer insights into Frontier’s pioneering architecture and the new scientific horizons that it promises to open.
Abstract
The world’s first exascale supercomputer, Frontier, has been in full production for over one year at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The talk will present some of the features of Frontier’s architecture that make it especially useful for many types of scientific computing, from its pure computing speed to its memory capacity. Some further details of Frontier’s architecture will be discussed, including the new AMD GPUs that provide the bulk of the computational power. Finally, there will be a showcase of some of the most impactful scientific results that have been enabled via the advanced capabilities of Frontier.
About the presenter
Bronson Messer is a Distinguished Staff Scientist and the Director of Science of the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He is also a Joint Faculty Professor in the Department of Physics & Astronomy at the University of Tennessee. His primary research interests are related to the explosion mechanisms and phenomenology of supernovae, especially neutrino transport and signatures. He has also worked on machine learning applied to galaxy merger simulations and performance modeling for HPC architectures. Messer recently served on the American Physical Society’s Committee on Informing the Public (2018-2020) and in 2020 he was awarded the Secretary of Energy’s Honor Award for his part in enabling the COVID-19 High-Performance Computing Consortium.