75 years of science and technology
What do you do when you can’t test your technology?
The United States faced that question when it halted nuclear weapons testing in 1992. The answer came in the form of virtual tests using high-performance computers.
Although “stockpile stewardship,” as it was known, drove the rapid development of massively parallel supercomputers, it was certainly not the only scientific discipline to benefit from them.
One person to see further potential in scientific computing was Alvin Trivelpiece, ORNL’s director through the ’90s. Current lab Director Thomas Zacharia credits Trivelpiece with placing ORNL on the road to becoming a major supercomputing power.
Trivelpiece recruited Ed Oliver, who created ORNL’s new Office of Laboratory Computing. It was Oliver who asked Zacharia in 1998 to step in as director of the lab’s Computer Science and Mathematics Division, a position others had turned down.
“He said, ‘Most likely you’ll fail in six months. Don’t worry about it. I’ll find you another job somewhere else,’” Zacharia recalled. “So that was my interview.”
Needless to say, Zacharia did not fail, and in 2002 he became ORNL’s first associate laboratory director in the new Computing and Computational Sciences Directorate. For all of the past dozen years, ORNL has had supercomputers among the world’s 10 most powerful—including the world’s fastest with Jaguar in 2009 and Titan in 2012. The lab’s newly unveiled Summit system is again the world’s fastest as well as an ideal tool for developing the growing field of artificial intelligence.
Along the way, ORNL’s strength in supercomputing has aided scientists both around the world and around the lab, and it has become central to the lab’s identity.
“Seventy percent of the scientific staff today at Oak Ridge National Laboratory have been here less than 10 years,” Zacharia noted. “They have joined Oak Ridge National Laboratory knowing and expecting Oak Ridge National Laboratory to be a preeminent computing institution in the world.”
