Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and Rensselaer are combining decades of expertise to help American industry and businesses expand use of high performance computing (HPC) under a recently signed memorandum of understanding.
“It’s well recognized that HPC is key to accelerating technological innovation and to fueling a nation’s economic vitality,” said Fred Streitz, director of LLNL’s High Performance Computing Innovation Center. “Our long, fruitful history of collaboration and joint scientific and technological discovery with RPI is a natural platform on which to build opportunities for companies to advance through the use of HPC.”
Livermore and Rensselaer will look to bridge the gap between the levels of computing conducted at their institutions and the typical levels found in industry. Scientific and engineering software applications capable of running on HPC platforms are a prime area of interest.
“The lack of highly scalable codes, especially commercial ones, presents a real barrier for companies, as does the integration of such codes into existing business workflows,” said Chris Carothers, director of the Rensselaer Center for Computational Innovations (CCI). “Companies have built whole workflows around these applications, but they don’t scale to the platforms available now and they won’t scale to the newer generations of upcoming platforms. This leaves them locked in a position unable to capitalize on advanced R&D solutions that are there for the taking.”
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Both Livermore and Rensselaer have built robust computational ecosystems equipped with the necessary resources to scale codes, including the hardware and infrastructure needed for testing and validating the codes, infrastructure, tools for optimization and debugging, and the people harboring the expertise and experience required to program at scale.
To fulfill its national security missions, LLNL applies its HPC modeling and simulation capabilities to both engineering and scientific problems. Rensselaer also applies HPC to the solution of practical engineering and design problems readily applicable to industry’s interest in improved product prototyping, development, and validation.
The MOU will allow LLNL and Rensselaer to better support the National Strategic Computing Initiative (NSCI) announced by President Obama on July 29, 2015. The NSCI guiding principles ensure continued U.S. leadership in supercomputing by fostering “public-private collaboration, relying on the respective strengths of government, industry, and academia to maximize the benefits of HPC,” and “applying new HPC technologies broadly for economic competitiveness and scientific discovery,” according to the Executive Order issued by the President.
“We bring complementary strengths to this collaboration. Both Rensselaer and LLNL have a lot of experience developing new software applications, as well as scaling up existing applications. We’re able to draw on the knowledge and work we’ve created and apply it toward advancing industry,” Carothers said.