The National Strategic Computing Initiative (NSCI) and Synergistic Opportunities for Massive-Scale Scientific and Data Analytic Computing

On July 29, 2015, President Obama signed an Executive Order to establish the National Strategic Computing Initiative (NSCI), a whole-of-nation effort to sustain and enhance U.S. leadership in high-performance computing (HPC). This talk is framed by the five objectives of NSCI, and will focus on an overview of the first two.

Objective 1 is: Accelerating delivery of an exascale computing system that integrates hardware and software capability to deliver approximately 100 times the performance of current 10 petaflop systems across a range of applications representing government needs. The response to objective 1 is led by the U.S. Department of Energy and is largely embodied in the Exascale Computing Project (ECP). This talk will describe the four technical focus areas of ECP: Application Development, Software Technology, Hardware Technology, and Exascale Systems. This talk will also describe holistic co-design, a key element of the ECP integration strategy.

Objective 2 is: Increasing coherence between the technology base used for modeling and simulation and that used for data analytic computing. Opportunities to increase technology coherence between traditional HPC and large-scale data analytics (LSDA), exist in system software, hardware technology and algorithms. Even traditional modeling and simulation applications can benefit from integration of LSDA capabilities into new workflows that support Exascale Computing.
NSCI objective 2 helps set the context for discussions about ECP-Sandia alignments to Columbia University’s Data Science Institute and the new Frontiers in Computing Systems working group.

BIO:
Dr. James Ang is the technical manager of the Exascale Computing Program organization at Sandia National Laboratories. He is also the Hardware Technology Director for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Exascale Computing Project (ECP). In this role, James’ primary responsibility is to define and implement the ECP research and development strategy for component, node and system architecture designs. Areas of interest include advanced memory and storage subsystems, interconnection networks, system-on-chip processor designs, large-scale system resilience, power monitoring and control, application performance analysis, and high performance computing co-design with proxy applications, proxy architectures, architectural analysis and advanced architecture testbeds.

James is also the President and founding board member of the Association for High Speed Computing (AHSC). AHSC is a professional non-for-profit organization that was established in 2009 to facilitate technical exchanges on high performance computing among national laboratory, industry, university and other government agency representatives. James received his Ph.D. (1986) and M.S. (1984) degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California at Berkeley. He also received a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1982, and a B.A. in Physics from Grinnell College in 1981.

Hosted by: Prof. Steven Nowick, Chair
Frontiers in Computing Systems | Data Science Institute Working Group