Oak Ridge Today

China passes U.S. in number of top supercomputers; ORNL’s Titan drops to 5th

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The Titan supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory is pictured above. (Photo by ORNL/U.S. Department of Energy)

The Titan supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory is pictured above. (Photo by ORNL/U.S. Department of Energy)

 

China has passed the United States in the total number of top ranked supercomputers, and Titan at Oak Ridge National Laboratory has dropped from fourth to fifth on the TOP500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers.

The TOP500 list is released twice a year, once in June and once in November. It is based on a benchmark test known as Linpack.

Titan at ORNL dropped from third to fourth in June, bumped from the number three spot by the upgraded Piz Daint, a Cray XC50 system installed at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre. Titan is capable of 17.59 petaflops. A petaflop is one quadrillion calculations per second. That’s 1,000 trillion calculations per second. Piz Daint is capable of 19.59 petaflops.

That power is useful in scientific research. At ORNL, Titan is used for research in areas such as materials science, nuclear energy, combustion, and climate science. ORNL is a U.S. Department of Energy laboratory.

Titan slipped one more spot in this month’s list, from fourth to fifth. It was displaced by the upgraded Gyoukou supercomputer. That is a ZettaScaler-2.2 system capable of 19.14 petaflops and deployed at Japan’s Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, the home of the Earth Simulator. [Read more…]

ORNL researchers turn to ‘deep learning’ to solve science’s big data problem

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Scientists will use Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s computing resources such as the Titan supercomputer to develop deep learning solutions for data analysis. (Photo credit: Jason Richards/Oak Ridge National Laboratory, U.S. Department of Energy)

Scientists will use Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s computing resources such as the Titan supercomputer to develop deep learning solutions for data analysis. (Photo credit: Jason Richards/Oak Ridge National Laboratory, U.S. Department of Energy)

 

By Scott Jones, Oak Ridge National Laboratory

A team of researchers from Oak Ridge National Laboratory has been awarded nearly $2 million over three years from the U.S. Department of Energy to explore the potential of machine learning in revolutionizing scientific data analysis.

The Advances in Machine Learning to Improve Scientific Discovery at Exascale and Beyond (ASCEND) project aims to use deep learning to assist researchers in making sense of massive datasets produced at the world’s most sophisticated scientific facilities. Deep learning is an area of machine learning that uses artificial neural networks to enable self-learning devices and platforms. The team, led by ORNL’s Thomas Potok, includes Robert Patton, Chris Symons, Steven Young, and Catherine Schuman.

While deep learning has long been used to classify relatively simple data such as photographs, today’s scientific data presents a much greater challenge because of its size and complexity. Deep learning offers the potential to truly change the way in which researchers use massive datasets to solve challenges spanning the scientific spectrum.

For example, neutron scattering data collected at ORNL’s Spallation Neutron Source contain rich scientific information about structure and dynamics of materials under investigation, and deep learning could help researchers better understand the link between experimental data and materials properties.

“This understanding can help scientists build and support new scientific theories, and help to design better materials,” Potok said. [Read more…]

Supercomputers: China still has top two, ORNL’s Titan remains No. 3

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Titan Supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory

The Titan supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory was once ranked as the world’s most powerful supercomputer, but it was ranked number three in November 2016 in the semiannual TOP500 List. (Photo courtesy of ORNL)

 

China still has the two fastest supercomputers in the world, and Titan at Oak Ridge National Laboratory remains number three.

The semi-annual TOP500 List of the world’s top supercomputers was released last Monday, November 14, at a conference in Salt Lake City.

Titan, a Cray XK7 system installed at ORNL, a U.S. Department of Energy laboratory, has achieved 17.59 petaflops, or quadrillions of calculations per second.

The most powerful supercomputer, a relatively new Chinese supercomputer named Sunway TaihuLight, is capable of 93 petaflops. It is built entirely using processors designed and made in China. In June, it displaced Tianhe-2, an Intel-based Chinese supercomputer that had claimed the number one spot on the six previous TOP500 lists.

Tianhe-2, the number two system, achieved a speed of 33.86 petaflops, or more than 33,000 trillion calculations per second, in a test known as the LINPACK benchmark. That ranking program uses a series of linear equations to test computer systems around the world. [Read more…]

ORNL-led study analyzes electric grid vulnerabilities in extreme weather areas  

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A new ORNL-developed method pinpoints electrical service areas across the southern United States most vulnerable to climate change and predicted population growth, which could inform decision makers about future substation needs. (Photo by ORNL)

A new ORNL-developed method pinpoints electrical service areas across the southern United States most vulnerable to climate change and predicted population growth, which could inform decision makers about future substation needs. (Photo by ORNL)

 

Climate and energy scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory have developed a new method to pinpoint which electrical service areas will be most vulnerable as populations grow and temperatures rise.

“For the first time, we were able to apply data at a high enough resolution to be relevant,” said ORNL’s Melissa Allen, co-author of “Impacts of Climate Change on Sub-regional Electricity Demand and Distribution in the Southern United States,” published in Nature Energy.

Allen and her team developed new algorithms that combine ORNL’s unique infrastructure and population datasets with high-resolution climate simulations run on the lab’s Titan supercomputer. The integrated approach identifies substations at the neighborhood level and determines their ability to handle additional demand based on predicted changes in climate and population.

The new, high-resolution capability can explore the interconnections in complex systems such as critical infrastructure and weather and determine potential pathways to adapt to future global change, a press release said. [Read more…]

ORNL, Titan helping DOE supercomputers fight cancer

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Titan Supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Oak Ridge National Laboratory and its Titan supercomputer are helping the U.S. Department of Energy fight cancer. (Photo courtesy of ORNL)

 

Oak Ridge National Laboratory and its Titan supercomputer are helping the U.S. Department of Energy fight cancer through a national initiative called Cancer Moonshot.

U.S. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz wrote about the use of DOE supercomputers to fight cancer in an article posted on Medium.com on Friday.

“Cancer is a worldwide public health problem, and the second-leading cause of death in the United States,” Moniz said. “Although cancer mortality has declined in recent years, there is no one who hasn’t been touched by cancer personally. So when President Obama announced that Vice President Biden would lead the Cancer Moonshot during his State of the Union address and asked for all hands on deck, I was eager to join the Cancer Moonshot Task Force and lend the support of the Department of Energy and our 17 national laboratories.”

As part of the initiative, the U.S. Department of Energy is launching three pilot projects in partnership with the National Cancer Institute, ORNL spokesperson Morgan McCorkle said. The projects will bring together nearly 100 cancer researchers, care providers, computer scientists, and engineers to apply the nation’s most advanced supercomputing capabilities to analyze data from preclinical models in cancer, cancer surveillance data, and molecular interaction data for RAS genes, McCorkle said. (About one third of all human cancers, including a high percentage of pancreatic, lung, and colorectal cancers, are driven by mutations in RAS genes, according to the National Cancer Institute.) [Read more…]

Miaofang Chi of ORNL named top scientist at UT-Battelle’s Awards Night

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Miaofang Chi

Miaofang Chi (Photo by ORNL)

Miaofang Chi of the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory has earned the ORNL Director’s Award for Outstanding Individual Accomplishment in Science and Technology.

ORNL Director Thom Mason presented the award to Chi on Friday during the annual Awards Night event in Knoxville hosted by UT-Battelle, the management and operating contractor for ORNL.

Chi was honored for her pioneering early career research in analytical electron microscopy. Chi’s research has advanced the understanding of defect and interface chemistry and structure and how such defects control materials properties at the atomic level. Her work includes the recent development of transformative insitu microscopy methods to probe transport phenomena at the atomic scale.

Chi also earned the Early-Career Researcher Award. [Read more…]

ORNL’s Titan still No. 2 as China triples Top500 supercomputers

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Titan Supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory

The Titan supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory was once ranked as the world’s most powerful supercomputer, but it has since been ranked number two. (Photo courtesy of ORNL)

 

The Titan supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory remained at number two on a list of the world’s top 500 supercomputers released Monday. China tripled the number of its systems on the semiannual Top500 list, while the number of systems in the United States fell to the lowest point since the list was created in 1993.

The Tianhe-2 supercomputer in China again maintained the number one spot on the list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. It’s the sixth consecutive time Tianhe-2 has been the top supercomputer. The system was developed by China’s National University of Defense Technology.

Titan was once the most powerful supercomputer.

The 46th edition of the twice-yearly TOP500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers was released Monday. [Read more…]

ORNL project director to discuss world-leading computing at noon Tuesday

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Buddy Bland

Buddy Bland (Photo by ORNL)

Buddy Bland, project director of the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, will discuss world-leading computing and ORNL sciences during a lunchtime meeting Tuesday.

The meeting on Tuesday, September 8, is open to the public.

“Today, the Titan supercomputer at ORNL is one of the world’s fastest and most productive tools for science at every scale,” a press release said. “From the composition of nucleons from quarks, to nanomaterials, to chemistry and biology, to transportation, to fission and fusion reactors, to astrophysics, modeling, and simulation using high-performance computers has transformed the way we do science and engineering. This presentation will cover a brief history of computing at ORNL, where we are going in the future, and the impact that computing has on our local community, the nation, and the world.” [Read more…]