Chief Research Officer, Sandia National Laboratories. US.

“Exascale and AI: A Great Marriage”

Abstract

The US Department of Energy (DOE) Exascale Computing Project (ECP) has just “crossed the finish line” by far exceeding expectations relative to its targeted Key Performance Parameters (KPPs) of application capability and performance, functional and portable software stack, and investment in node and system hardware design for the first three exascale systems in the US.
Early results and expected outcomes will be highlighted for ECP’s mission need application projects – each addressing an exascale challenge problem and ECP’s Extreme Scale Scientific Software Stack (E4S) that includes advanced mathematical libraries, extreme-scale programming environments, development tools, visualization libraries, and the sotftware infrastructure to support large-scale data management and data science for science and security applications. ECP has also more then “dabbled” in AI, as the three exascale systems collectively offer >100K GPUs, with each system poised to be game-changing training and inference engines for DOE foundational models in science, energy, and national security. Early and promising results in AI model training performance will be highlighted on the Frontier system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). Examples of possible far-reaching outcomes for AI systems in DOE mission space in post-ECP programs will be also given.

Bio

Douglas B. Kothe (Doug) has thirty-eight 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 and 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 in 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.

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Video 2024

Speaker Experience Interview Video 2024

Doug is a returning speaker. Please refer to his 2023 talk “Dawn of the Exascale Computing Era” and watch his interview that year.

Click to download 2024 Slides in pdf.