Our focus is what we call commercial high performance computing, as a simultaneous acknowledgment of and differentiation from traditional HPC. We are not the same, as HPC is all about FORTRAN and super grids, and C-HPC is all about data and whole file analytic processing. But we acknowledge the tremendous advances HPC is making, and we are grateful for the trickle-down of technology and research.

This article outlines a very ambitious plan and a major new initiative to attack it. Of particular note: “In order to continue to make progress in running scientific applications at these [very large] scales,” says Jeff Nichols, who heads the Oak Ridge branch of the institute, “we need to address our ability to maintain the balance between the hardware and the software. There are huge software and programming challenges and our goal is to do the critical R&D to close some of the gaps.”