US DOE launches HPC research program

The US Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Science has announced a new $23 million research and development program led by Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). The  initiative will see a team led by ORNL source R&D proposals across the areas of hardware, software, and critical technologies with a focus on energy efficiency.

“With Dennard scaling long dead and the slowing of Moore’s law, we’re seeing technologies critical to HPC consuming more power that partially offset increases in application performance due to improvements in silicon process nodes and improved packaging techniques,” said ORNL’s Christopher Zimmer, New Frontiers project director. “Current technology trends threaten to have a disruptive and costly impact on the development of DOE applications and potentially a negative impact on the productivity of DOE scientists.”

ORNL’s Al Geist, director of the Frontier project, added: “Energy efficiency is becoming critical to building future generations of leadership-scale computers and will involve development of new approaches to hardware, software, and application algorithms."