Computer scientist Adolfy Hoisie has joined the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory to lead PNNL’s high performance computing activities. In one such activity, Hoisie will direct a group of scientists designing supercomputers and their software applications simultaneously — so all the components of a supercomputer can be optimized and focused on one kind of problem. As director of PNNL’s Center for Advanced Architectures for Extreme Scale Computing, Hoisie is planning on tackling the kind of problems that can be found in a variety of scientific fields, from studying biological systems to understanding the electrical power grid. Some of these applications rely on the sheer computational power of supercomputers in the process of scientific discovery. In other areas, researchers amass so much data — petabytes, a million billion times more bytes than in one character on a page — that their supercomputers need more than just fast processors, they need to be able to shuttle that data around rapidly. Most supercomputers, such as Cray’s Jaguar at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, gain their fame due to how fast they perform calculations — their processing speed. But a speedy processor won’t matter if the computer can’t move data between memory and the hard drive fast enough or if it can’t handle rivers of data coming in from instruments taking measurements. Read More
