As supercomputing surges toward the exascale—1018 floating-point operations per second (flops), or 1000 times as powerful as today’s top-performing petaflop machines—the US Department of Energy and its national laboratories are promoting the use of high-performance computing (HPC) to power the development of clean-energy technologies.
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), home to some of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, cosponsored a conference in Washington, DC, in May that focused on the application of HPC to clean-energy technology. The laboratory anticipates becoming host to one of the world’s two fastest computers when the IBM system it calls Sequoia is completed next year.
“Energy is fundamentally a materials issue,” said Thom Mason, director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where a Cray supercomputer also due for completion in 2012 is expected to equal Sequoia’s 20-petaflop performance. Most energy sources are limited by the performance of materials, he noted, and added that some materials...
