ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Four Sandia researchers have been awarded three-year grants totalling $2.6 million from the Department of Energy’s Office of Science to pursue computational research proposals that would help create an exascale computer.

An exascale computer would be 1,000 times faster than a petascale computer, the fastest now available, which operates at a quadrillion operations per second.

The faster technology would be useful in computation-intensive areas that include basic research, engineering, earth science, biology, materials science, energy issues and national security.

The winners are:

• Robert Armstrong, $834,000 for his project, “COMPOSE-HPC:  Software Composition for Extreme Scale Computational Science and Engineering,” in the category of X-Stack Software Research. (HPC is an abbreviation for high-performance computing.)  X-Stack refers to the scientific software stack that supports extreme-scale scientific computing, from operating systems to development environments.
• Kenneth Moreland, $598,406 for “A Pervasive Parallel Processing Framework for Data Visualization and Analysis at Extreme Scale.” Current visualization systems rely on a coarse partitioning of data for their units to operate in parallel and thus cannot scale to an exascale system. The intent of this project is to design a better programming paradigm able to guide visualization algorithms in all parts of the algorithm and its implementation.
• Ronald Minnich, $615,000 for “A Fault-Oblivious Extreme-Scale Execution Environment,” in the category of X-Stack Software Research. The Fault-Oblivious X-stack project is led by Sandia and includes Los Alamos National Laboratory, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Ohio State University, Boston University, IBM, and Bell Labs. The goal is to build an HPC system software stack that runs correctly even as faults occur.
• Kevin Pedretti, $572,500 for “Enabling Exascale Hardware and Software Design through Scalable System Virtualization,” in the category of X-Stack Software Research. The objective of this project is to apply scalable system virtualization techniques to enable the wide range of innovation necessary to realize productive exascale computing. In addition to Sandia, the project involves researchers at the University of New Mexico, Northwestern University and Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multiprogram laboratory operated and managed by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin Corporation, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies, and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Neal Singer, nsinger@sandia.gov (505) 845-7078