The Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility has informed the recipients of high-performance computing time through the SummitPLUS allocation program, which extends the operation of the Summit supercomputer through October 2024.
Over 19 million hours of compute time will be distributed among 108 projects covering the gamut of scientific inquiry, from aerodynamics to systems biology. Recipients come from academia, government laboratories, federal agencies and industry.
“We are excited to see the results that these projects will yield in 2024. SummitPLUS provides a special opportunity for researchers to continue producing groundbreaking science on a supercomputer system that has already made a huge impact in so many different domains,” said Bronson Messer, the OLCF’s director of science at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Summit debuted in 2018 at No.1 on the TOP500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers with a peak performance of 200 petaflops. Since then, nearly 5,000 users have used Summit to conduct research on climate, energy, public health and national security. Although its successor, the exascale-class Frontier supercomputer, is now the OLCF’s primary system for open-science projects, Summit is still the fourth fastest supercomputer in the United States, seventh fastest in the world, and remains a powerful and reliable instrument for scientific discovery.
The SummitPLUS program encouraged proposals for emerging artificial intelligence/machine learning and data-intensive science projects. Among those 26 allocations, recipients include:
- Aditya Balu of Iowa State University, who received 100,000 node hours to develop foundational AI models for agriculture.
- Jonathan MacArt of the University of Notre Dame, who received 250,000 node hours to investigate deep learning closure for large eddy simulation of transitional hypersonic shockwave-boundary layer interactions.
- Rahul Ramachandran of NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, who received over 120,000 node hours to improve understanding of extreme weather events with AI forecast emulators.
SummitPLUS also awarded compute time to projects from a diverse range of universities, including minority-serving institutions. Those recipients are:
- Myoungkyu Lee at the University of Houston received 200,000 node hours to study particle-resolved direct numerical simulation of particulate buoyancy-driven turbulent convection.
- Travis Wheeler at the University of Arizona received 288,000 node hours to conduct 6,000 kinase simulations for a new molecular dynamics repository.
- Philip Kurian at Howard University received 30,000 node hours for computing many-body dispersion and superradiance effects in biomacromolecular dynamics in aqueous environments.
SummitPLUS also allocated compute time for industrial projects. Those researchers include:
- Zongtang Fang of Nissan Technical Center North America, who received 100,000 node hours to conduct first-principles studies of NMC (nickel manganese cobalt)-carbon interfaces.
- Vineet Ahuja of Whisper Aero Inc., who received 100,000 node hours to conduct aerodynamic and aeroacoustic simulations of a regional air mobility aircraft with distributed electric propulsion.
- Noah Reddell of Zap Energy, who received 300,000 node hours to study Z-pinch plasma by a 3D kinetic model on slimmed-memory GPUs.
SummitPLUS recipients include six early-career scientists, 17 female principal investigators and nine projects affiliated with DOE’s Integrated Research Infrastructure program.
The OLCF is a DOE Office of Science user facility located at ORNL.
UT-Battelle manages ORNL for DOE’s Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. DOE’s Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit energy.gov/science. — Coury Turczyn
