Exascale Frontiers: CEA and DOE partnerships in HPC and simulation
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I was honored to be invited to the French Embassy in Washington, D.C., to participate in a special roundtable celebrating the 80th anniversary of the CEA (French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission).
As part of the “Exascale Frontiers” session, I joined colleagues from the DOE and CEA to discuss how our 30-year partnership in simulation is shaping the future of supercomputing. Moderated by Doug Black of insideHPC, the discussion was a great opportunity to look back at our shared history and forward to the next generation of scientific discovery.
A few highlights from our discussion:
- The Power of Portability: We talked about how Kokkos and the CExA project act as a bridge, allowing scientists at both ORNL and CEA to write code once and run it on any supercomputer—regardless of whether it’s powered by NVIDIA, AMD, or Intel.
- A Sustainable Future: As a founder of the High Performance Software Foundation (HPSF), Christian shared why moving our core tools into a neutral, open-source home is vital for the long-term health of the global HPC ecosystem.
- More Than Just Code: It was inspiring to reflect on 30 years of joint simulation efforts. It’s not just about the FLOPs; it’s about a shared “software culture” that prepares the next generation of researchers for the exascale era and beyond.
It was a privilege to represent Oak Ridge National Laboratory at such a prestigious event and to see how deep the ties between our two nations’ scientific communities truly run.
Panelists:
- Moderator: Doug Black (insideHPC)
- Introduction: Christophe Calvin (CEA)
- Speakers: Denis Vacek (CEA), Christian Trott (Sandia), Jean-Luc Vay (LBNL), and myself (ORNL).
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