Shaping the Future of Supercomputing

The ALCF is advancing the use HPC and AI for science through contributions to standards groups, conferences, and strategic partnerships with industry leaders.

ALCF’s Nevin Liber provides an update on standardization and performance portability efforts with C++, SYCL, and Kokkos at the 2024 Exascale Computing Project Industry and Agency Council Meeting at Argonne National Laboratory.

Computing Conferences and Events

ALCF researchers regularly contribute to some of the world’s leading computing conferences and events to share their latest advances in areas ranging from computational science and AI to HPC software and exascale technologies. In 2024, Argonne staff participated in a wide range of events including:

HPC Standards and Community Groups

ALCF staff members remain actively involved in several HPC standards and community groups that help drive improvements in the usability and efficiency of scientific computing tools, technologies, and applications. Staff activities include contributions to the following:

ALCF's Sam Foreman presents over AuroraGPT at the 2024 Hands-on HPC Workshop.

Performance Portability

The ALCF continued its collaboration with NERSC and OLCF to operate and maintain a website dedicated to enabling performance portability across the DOE Office of Science HPC facilities. The website serves as a documentation hub and guide for applications teams targeting systems at multiple computing facilities. The DOE computing facilities staff also collaborate on various projects and training events to maximize the portability of scientific applications on diverse supercomputer architectures.

Vendor Collaborations

The ALCF works closely with many companies in the HPC and AI industries to develop and deploy cutting-edge hardware and software for the research community. This includes collaborating with Intel and HPE to deliver the Aurora exascale system, working with HPE to deploy the Polaris testbed supercomputer, and partnering with NVIDIA on system enhancements and training related to ThetaGPU. Such partnerships are critical to ensuring the facility’s supercomputing resources meet the requirements of the scientific computing community. In addition, the ALCF is working with several AI start-up companies, including Cerebras, Graphcore, Groq, and SambaNova, to deploy a diverse set of AI accelerators as part of the ALCF AI Testbed. The testbed is playing a key role in determining how AI accelerators can be applied to scientific research, while also allowing vendors to prepare their software and hardware for scientific AI workloads.