Early Science Program
ALCF Aurora Early Science Program is underway
Aurora ESP Postdoctoral Opportunities!
Join us in launching the first scientific calculations on our next-generation leadership system, Aurora. We are looking for motivated candidates for two-year ALCF postdoctoral appointments working with our ten Aurora ESP projects. You'll find brief descriptions of the positions, and links for applying, on our Careers page.
As part of the process of bringing a new supercomputer into production, the ALCF hosts the Early Science Program (ESP) to ensure its next-generation systems are ready to hit the ground running. The intent of the ESP is to use the critical pre-production time period to prepare key applications for the architecture and scale of a new supercomputer, and to solidify libraries and infrastructure to pave the way for other production applications to run on the system. In addition to fostering application readiness, the ESP allows researchers to pursue innovative computational science projects not possible on today’s leadership-class supercomputers.
The ALCF’s current ESP has two phases with two separate calls for proposals. The first phase is for Theta, an early production system based on Intel’s second-generation Xeon Phi processor. Slated for delivery in late 2016, Theta will serve as a bridge between the ALCF’s current system, Mira, and the next leadership-class supercomputer, Aurora, which is scheduled for delivery in 2018. The Theta ESP call for proposals was open from April 22 - May 22, 2015, and projects were selected in July 2015. For details, see the Theta ESP project announcement.
The second phase of the ESP is for Aurora, a fully integrated system featuring multiple Intel HPC technologies, including third-generation Xeon Phi processors, second-generation Omni-Path, a powerful memory architecture and advanced file system storage and software. The call for proposals for the Aurora ESP is was open from July 6 to September 2, 2016. We selected 10 projects, which will be supported by ALCF and vendor staff, as well as a funded ALCF postdoc. On January 30, 2016, we announced the Aurora ESP projects.
The Theta and Aurora Early Science Programs are based on the ALCF's highly successful Mira ESP.
ALCF Theta Early Science Program Presentations at IXPUG 2016
Multiple projects from the ALCF Theta Early Science Program gave presentations at the 2016 IXPUG Annual U.S. Meeting on preparing applications for Theta:
- Williams, "ALCF Early Science Program for Xeon Phi Supercomputers"
- Li et al., "MILC Staggered Conjugate Gradient Performance on Intel KNL"
- Boyle et al., "Grid: Structured Cartesian Mesh Library for Quantum Chromodynamics"
- Finkel et al., "HACC on the KNL - Porting, Optimizing, and Early Experiences"
- Joo et al., "Chroma on Knights Landing Three Ways"
Several other talks related indirectly, with ALCF contribution:
- Luo et al., "Optimizations of Bspline-based Orbital Evaluations in Quantum Monte Carlo on Multi/Many-core Shared Memory Processors"
- DiStasio et al., "Enabling Large-Scale Hybrid Density Functional Theory Based Ab Initio Molecular Dynamics in Condensed-Phase Systems"
- Alexeev et al., "Efficient MPI/OpenMP Parallelization of the Hartree-Fock Method on Intel® Xeon Phi Processors"
- Finkel, "LLVM and Clang on the KNL"
- Rizzi et al., "Visualization with vl3. Now on the CPU"