- Article By: Tracey Bryant Photos by Evan Krape and courtesy of the U.S. Department of Energy
UD students de-bug vital programming tools
Congratulations to Prof. Sunita Chandrasekaran and her research group for their work with the new Frontier Super Computer.
Frontier, the supercomputer at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Lab in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. In May 2022, it was named the fastest computer in the world, clocking in at 1.1 exaflops, which is more than a quintillion calculations per second. That’s a whole lot of math problems to solve — more than 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 of them — in the blink of an eye, a feat that earned Frontier the coveted status as the first computer to achieve exascale computing power.
To take advantage of the system’s specialized architecture, she and her fellow researchers are working to make sure the computer code in high-priority software is literally up to Frontier’s speed — and that it’s bug-free — some of the key components of the Exascale Computing Project SOLLVE, which Chandrasekaran now leads. It is a collaboration of Brookhaven National Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Georgia Tech and UD.
“Our team has been working together since 2017 to stress-test the software to improve the system,” Chandrasekaran said, noting that the work involves collaborations with several compiler developers that provide implementations for Frontier.