About ECP
The ECP is a seven-year $1.7B R&D effort that launched in 2016.
The mission of the Exascale Computing Project (ECP) is the accelerated delivery of a capable exascale computing ecosystem to provide breakthrough solutions addressing our most critical challenges in scientific discovery, energy assurance, economic competitiveness, and national security.
As a multi-lab effort, sponsored by the DOE’s Office of Science and National Nuclear Security Administration, the ECP is chartered with the following tasks:
- Developing exascale-ready applications and solutions that address currently intractable problems of strategic importance and national interest.
- Creating and deploying an expanded and vertically integrated software stack on DOE HPC pre-exascale and exascale systems.
- Delivering US HPC vendor technology advances and deploying ECP products to DOE HPC pre-exascale and exascale systems.
- Delivering exascale simulation and data science innovations and solutions to national problems that enhance US economic competitiveness, change our quality of life, and strengthen our national security.
The project includes more than 100 top-notch R&D teams, 1,000 researchers and has delivered hundreds of consequential milestones on schedule and within budget since the project began.
The project is organized around three technical focus areas: Application Development, Software Technology, and Hardware and Integration, supported by a Project Management Office.
The ECP is managed by six core DOE National Laboratories: Argonne, Lawrence Berkeley, Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, and Sandia.
Oak Ridge National Laboratory is proud to serve as the host site for the ECP’s project office and will soon launch its own exascale system, Frontier.
Scheduled for delivery in 2021, Frontier will accelerate innovation in science and technology and maintain US leadership in high-performance computing and artificial intelligence. Frontier users will model the entire lifespan of a nuclear reactor, uncover disease genetics, and build on recent developments in science and technology to further integrate artificial intelligence with data analytics and modeling and simulation.
The system will be based on Cray’s new Shasta architecture and Slingshot interconnect with high-performance AMD EPYC CPU and Radeon Instinct GPU technology. The new accelerator-centric compute blades will support a 4:1 GPU-to-CPU ratio with high-speed links and coherent memory between them within the node. With Frontier, scientists will be able to pack in more calculations, identify new patterns in data, and develop innovative data analysis methods to accelerate the pace of scientific discovery.
In addition to serving as the host site for the ECP’s project office, ORNL has multiple levels of participation in the ECP activities.