Scientific successes of the Summit supercomputer

COVID-19. Exploding stars. Jet engines. Diamonds and fusion energy. 

ORNL’s Summit supercomputer is enabling research to improve scientists’ understanding of the virus’ structure and biology towards developing targeted therapies and vaccines.

These and other scientific challenges are being addressed by users of Summit, the nation’s most powerful supercomputer, which is located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Perhaps most important, codes written for Summit, the second most powerful supercomputer in the world, have provided valuable information in the search for promising drugs to combat the COVID-19 disease that has killed more than 800,000 Americans.

Bronson Messer, director of science at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility at ORNL, spoke about Summit’s scientific successes during a recent virtual talk to Friends of ORNL (FORNL) on “Computational Science at the Dawn of the Exascale Era.”

The new building housing the Frontier supercomputer is the product of the largest, most comprehensive upgrade in the history of ORNL. It accommodates massive upgrades to the power and cooling infrastructures needed for an exascale supercomputer, as well as more than 100 new offices and seven new research facilities.

He also described the Frontier supercomputer under construction at ORNL. This exascale machine will be capable of a quintillion calculations per second — that is, a billion times a billion floating point operations per second, or FLOPS (e.g., addition or multiplication of numbers with decimal points). When Frontier begins fully operating at the end of this year, it will be five times faster than the most powerful supercomputers in use today.

According to Messer, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Exascale Computing Project will focus on national problems in six strategic areas: health care (e.g., cancer research), national security, energy security (wind turbines, small modular reactors), economic security (additive manufacturing, power grid planning, earthquake risk assessment) and scientific discovery (prediction and control of material properties).

Bronson Messer describes how Oak Ridge National Laboratory's supercomputers have contributed to or will advance scientific understanding.

Messer is a computational astrophysicist with degrees from the University of Tennessee, where he was a member of the college bowl team that won the national championship. He also appeared on the “Jeopardy!” TV quiz show.

He talked about projects in computational astrophysics that he has been working on using Summit and plans to work on using Frontier. He noted that all the chemical elements on Earth, “from iron in your blood to gold in your jewelry,” were believed to come from a single exploding star (supernova) before the solar system formed. One of his projects has been to trace the origins of elements that “have been cooked up by shock waves” in supernovae.


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