Now that you're No. 1, what next?
by Frank Munger
A few weeks after Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Jaguar supercomputer was certified as the fastest machine in the world, I asked Jeff Nichols, the lab's scientific computing chief, what was the future for the extraordinary Cray computer capable of 2.3 petaflops -- or 2.3 quadrillion calculations per second.
"This is a personal opinion, but I think the focus in 2010 and beyond is going to be on the idea of integration," Nichols said. "Integration means that you're really talking about a multi-disciplinary scientific effort. . . In fact, you could even focus on Obama's or Secretary Chu's priorities with regards to energy. How do we take the basic science that we know and translate that? How do the material and chemistry calcuations help us build the 500-mile battery or the more highly efficient, a 50 percent efficient photovoltaic solar panel? How do we do that, right? How do we take the material things that we're doing the nanoscience on and impact the transportation industry? That's where all our energy is."
We saw evidence of the lab's strategy last month, when the Department of Energy announced the award of 1.6 billion supercomputing hours as part of the INCITE (Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment) program. As part of the program, ORNL touted a project that would use Jaguar's high-end computing speed for developing materials of use in lithium air batteries that may be able to power a car for 500 miles on a single charge.
"Another important issue is climate change," Nichols said, noting that progress in that area is hugely dependent on computation capabilities. "How is the modeling and simulation we do in climate, how does it inform our energy strategies? If we know there's not going to be any sun in Tennessee, it's not very smart to put photovoltaic there . . . Climate change can help us understand our water supply system. We need water if we're going to build nuclear plants. There are lots of questions. That's what we're trying to do . . . That's one of the key focus areas of our new Climate Institute -- take the models that we have and include the physics and parameters and resolution to help us inform our energy strategy, making good energy decisions and good energy policy. That's going to be really important. We're going to be really focused on energy. We're going to work really hard to translate our basic sciences to the applied side."
