Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is the largest multiprogram science and energy laboratory in the Department of Energy system. Its mission: Deliver scientific discoveries and technical breakthroughs to accelerate the development of clean energy and national security. Located in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, ORNL is home to Frontier, the world’s fastest supercomputer at 1.194 exaflops/sec. Summit was designed and installed by HPE, and uses AMD EPYC processors and AMD GPUs.
Oak Ridge was one of three secret sites that helped develop the first atomic bomb. It hosted the world’s first permanent nuclear reactor and plutonium processing plant. Today the lab has a myriad of roles ranging from energy research to advanced manufacturing to biosciences to artificial intelligence.
2023 Winter Classic: Oak Ridge National Laboratory
2023 Oak Ridge Mentor Team Interview
We talked to the amazing Oak Ridge National Laboratory Blast Mentor Team (ORNL-BMT for short) and got a behind the scenes peek at the challenge they put together for the students. The ORNL-BMT did a fantastic job of selecting a meaty task for the students that would both build and test their HPC skills. The team really shone when it came to training; they provided a full slate of training materials on using Ascend and Athena, and they explained exactly what the students needed to do in a clear and concise way. Huge thanks to ORNL for setting up this module for the students – it is much appreciated by us and them.
2023 Winter Classic Oak Ridge Blast Challenge Results Revealed!
The close of the 2023 Winter Classic Invitational Student Cluster Competition is coming up fast, and I have to get some material out to you, our vast viewing audience, as quickly as possible, if not quicker. I’ve been traveling a lot recently, which has delayed my reporting on the event.
In this edition of the Studio Update Show, we reveal the results of the Oak Ridge Blast Challenge, which had students simulating the effects of a blast spreading through an image. In doing this, student learned how to use AthenaPK and how to manipulate meshes on the Frontier-like Ascend system at ORNL.
I’m joined in this show by cluster competition veteran Hai Ah Nam, whom you may recognize from her many appearances in my previous cluster competition videos, whether she was commentating or just cracking wise. We talk a little about her past contributions to the competitions, which is fun.
My regular broadcast partner, Addison Snell, was out on assignment introducing his new winter wear fashion line on the catwalk in Paris. (Check out 00:47 of the video to see more.)
In the video, Hai Ah and I go through the ORNL Blast Challenge, commenting on the difficulty and how this will prepare students for work in the HPC real world. And then we get to the results themselves with a look at “The Big Board.”
2022 Oak Ridge Mentor Interview
We interviewed the mentors from Oak Ridge National Lab and learned all about their machine learning challenge. They spoke to the task and how well the students coped with it (pretty well, as it turns out), plus discussed other outreach activities they'll be driving in the near future.
2022 Winter Classic - Oak Ridge Results Revealed!
The 2022 Winter Classic Invitational Student Cluster Competition is turning out to be one of the tightest student cluster competitions ever. This event, which started in early February, pits student teams from twelve Historically Black Colleges and Universities and Hispanic Serving Institutions against each other to see which team can run and optimize HPC workloads.
This is a virtual competition with the teams receiving instruction from and running their workloads on clusters hosted by four competition mentors: HPE, NASA, Oak Ridge National Lab, and Amazon AWS. The teams just finished up with Oak Ridge and will be starting with AWS and OpenFOAM next week.
A very close race got even closer with the unveiling of the student team scores from the Oak Ridge Machine Learning module. Out of a possible total of 500 points available in the competition to date, five teams are within 35.88 points of each other. These teams are arrayed from second to sixth place and all are anxious to nab as many of the remaining 200 points as they can.
This paper thin margin between the top teams is unprecedented and serves to put additional pressure on the teams to make the most of the AWS module and run the wheels off of OpenFOAM. No one is safe on the leaderboard.
Here's what the Big Board looks like today:
For more details and exciting commentary, click your clickers on the YouTube below and hear Addison Snell and me go through all of the results from this week and speculate on what'll happen in the future. It's the best use of 11:53 of your time today, you'll love it.