Science and supercomputers at ORNL topic of Mar. 8 talk

Bronson Messer, director of science at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, will speak virtually to Friends of ORNL at noon Tuesday, March 8, on “Computational Science at the Dawn of the Exascale Era.”

He will describe important scientific findings that resulted from modeling and simulations at the Summit supercomputer at ORNL, including work relevant to combating the COVID-19 disease, a news release stated.

He will also mention research projects planned for the Frontier supercomputer under construction at ORNL. This “exascale” machine will be capable of a billion calculations per second, which is 50 times faster than the most powerful supercomputers in use today and 1,000 times faster than the supercomputers that came online 14 years ago.

The talk is open to the public. To view the virtual lecture, click on the talk title on the homepage of the www.fornl.org website and click on the Zoom link near the top of the page describing the lecture. Here is Messer’s summary of what he will talk about, as included in a news release.

“Regardless of our increasing reliance on and familiarity with computing power in our everyday lives, modern supercomputers are unique scientific instruments, more akin to the Large Hadron Collider or the James Webb Space Telescope than to our laptop computers and cellphones. Unlike those large devices, however, supercomputers are also among the most versatile of scientific instruments, as they push back frontiers in physics, biology, climate and many other fields.