The School of Computational Science and Engineering invites you for a distinguished guest lecture from Doug Kothe, Associate Laboratory Director of Computing and Computational Sciences Directorate at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Who: Doug Kothe; Oak Ridge National Laboratory and U.S. Department of Energy; Associate Laboratory Director of Computing and Computational Sciences Directorate (ORNL) and Director of Exascale Computing Project (DOE)

When: Tuesday, March 7, 1:00 – 2:00 

Where: TSRB Auditorium (Room 118)

Title: Dawn of the Exascale Computing Era

Abstract: With the recent arrival of the Frontier system in the US at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), and with the applications and software technologies under development as part of the US Department of Energy (DOE) Exascale Computing Project (ECP) now poised to exploit Frontier’s capabilities to tackle problems of national and international interest, the highly anticipated “dawn of the exascale computing era” is here. This is indeed a very exciting time for the world’s high-performance computing (HPC) community, as many exascale uncertainties and challenges over the past decade or so have been surpassed. Given the concerted US DOE investments in the ECP and architectural co-design embodied in Frontier, this exascale system is and will continue to be “used, useful, and affordable” over its lifetime. Exascale-capable applications are a foundational element of the ECP and the vehicle for delivery of mission need on targeted exascale systems such as Frontier. The ECP’s mission need application projects, each addressing an exascale challenge problem—a high-priority strategic problem of national interest that is intractable without at least 50 times the computational power of the HPC systems available at the project’s inception in 2016. Exascale applications are built on underlying software technologies, which play an essential supporting role in application efficacy on computing systems. The ECP’s ST effort is developing an expanded and vertically integrated software stack that includes advanced mathematical libraries, extreme-scale programming environments, development tools, visualization libraries, and the software infrastructure to support large-scale data management and data science for science and security applications. The ST efforts complement and integrate into the broader scientific software ecosystem that includes capabilities from industry and the broader HPC R&D community. Architectural details of the Frontier system will be given along with the challenges overcome in readying traditional and new exascale software technologies and applications as part of the ECP.

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.