Dr. Douglas B. Kothe
Director, Exascale Computing Project
Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Abstract

In just the past decade, heterogeneous node-based computing hardware and software architectures have moved from novelty to mainstream. Prototypical examples are the now ubiquitous “accelerators”, or GPU-based architectures designed to accelerate certain operations on data arranged in certain ways. This heterogeneity will soon be more extreme, where computing nodes will not just have GPU accelerators, but other application-specific accelerators such as those for key computational and data science motifs. GPU-based accelerators on supercomputers in the US Department of Energy (DOE) began with the Roadrunner and Titan systems, then on to the current Summit and Sierra and planned Perlmutter systems, and finally for the first three US exascale systems (Aurora, Frontier, El Capitan). Accelerated node hardware and software architectures are not only here and now but represent our collective future. The US scientific community must be able to effectively exploit these architectures to address urgent problems of National importance. A key response by the DOE was the launching of the Exascale Computing Project (ECP) in 2016, an aggressive RD&D project focused on delivery of mission critical applications, an integrated software stack, and exascale hardware technology advances – all within the context of an accelerated-node co-design software and algorithm paradigm.

Biography

Douglas B. Kothe (Doug) has thirty-five years of experience in conducting and leading applied R&D in computational science applications designed to simulate complex physical phenomena in the energy, defense, and manufacturing sectors. Doug is currently the Director of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Exascale Computing Project. Prior to that, he was Deputy Associate Laboratory Director of the Computing and Computational Sciences Directorate at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). Other positions for Doug at ORNL, where he has been since 2006, include Director of Science at the National Center for Computational Sciences (2006-2010) and Director of the Consortium for Advanced Simulation of Light Water Reactors (CASL), DOE’s first Energy Innovation Hub (2010-2015). In leading the CASL Hub, Doug drove the creation, application, and deployment of an innovative Virtual Environment for Reactor Applications (2016 R&D winner), which offered a technology step change for the US nuclear energy industry.

Before coming to ORNL, Doug spent 20 years at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he held a number of technical and line and program management positions, with a common theme being the development and application of modeling and simulation technologies targeting multi-physics phenomena characterized by the presence of compressible or incompressible interfacial fluid flow, where his field-changing accomplishments are known internationally. Doug also spent one year at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the late 1980s as a physicist in defense sciences.

Doug holds a Bachelor of Science in Chemical Engineering from the University of Missouri – Columbia (1983) and a Masters in Science (1986) and Doctor of Philosophy (1987) in Nuclear Engineering from Purdue University.

***This seminar will be streamed live on our NCStateNuclear YouTube channel***