Keynote Presentations
Opening Lecture PASC25 Conference
Fulfilling the Promise of the World’s First Exascale Supercomputer: Science on Frontier
Bronson Messer (Oak Ridge National Laboratory)
The world’s first exascale supercomputer, Frontier, has been in full production for over one year at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. I will describe some of the features of Frontier’s architecture that make it especially useful for many types of scientific computing, from its pure computing speed to its memory capacity. Some further details of Frontier’s architecture will be discussed, including the new AMD GPUs that provide the bulk of the computational power. Finally, we will take a look at some of the most impactful science results that have been enabled via the increased capability of Frontier.
Bronson Messer is Distinguished Staff Scientist and Director of Science for the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He is also Joint Faculty Professor in the Department of Physics & Astronomy at the University of Tennessee. His primary research interests are related to the explosion mechanisms and phenomenology of supernovae, especially neutrino transport and signatures. He has also worked ML applied to galaxy merger simulations and on performance modeling for HPC architectures. Messer recently served on the American Physical Society’s Committee on Informing the Public (2018-2020) and in 2020 he was awarded the Secretary of Energy’s Honor Award for his part in enabling the COVID-19 High-Performance Computing Consortium.