Tri-lab collaboration that will bring Sierra supercomputer to Lab recognized

The collaboration of Oak Ridge, Argonne and Lawrence Livermore (CORAL) that will bring the Sierra supercomputer to the Lab in 2018 has been recognized by HPCWire with an Editor’s Choice Award for Best HPC Collaboration between Government and Industry.

The award was received by Doug Wade, head of the Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) program, in the DOE booth at Supercomputing 2015 (SC15), and representatives from Oak Ridge and Argonne. HPCWire is an online news service that covers the high performance computing (HPC) industry.

CORAL represents an innovative procurement strategy pioneered by Livermore that couples acquisition with R&D non-recurring engineering (NRE) contracts that make it possible for vendors to assume greater risks in their proposals than they would otherwise for an HPC system that is several years out. Delivery of Sierra is expected in late 2017 with full deployment in 2018. This procurement strategy has since been widely adopted by DOE labs.

CORAL’s industry partners include IBM, NVIDIA and Mellanox. In addition to bringing Sierra to Livermore, CORAL will bring an HPC system called Summit to Oak Ridge National Laboratory and a system called Aurora to Argonne National Laboratory.

Sierra will be an IBM system expected to exceed 120 petaflops (120 quadrillion floating point operations per second) and will serve NNSA’s ASC program, an integral part of stockpile stewardship.

In other SC15 news, LLNL’s 20-petaflop (quadrillion floating point operations per second) IBM Blue Gene Q Sequoia system was again ranked No. 3 on the Top500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers released Tuesday. For the third year running, the Chinese Tiahne-2 (Milky Way-2) supercomputer holds the No. 1 ranking on the list followed by Titan at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. LLNL’s 5-petaflop Vulcan, also a Blue Gene Q system, dropped out of the top 10 on the list and is now ranked No. 12.

The United States has five of the top 10 supercomputers on the Top500 and four of those are DOE and NNSA systems. In addition to China, other countries with HPC systems in the top 10 include Germany, Japan, Switzerland and Saudi Arabia.