Advanced Technologies Research at NERSC

NERSC is more than just a world-class supercomputing facility. Part of its mission is also to enable and support the development of next-generation high performance computing (HPC) technologies and applications that will best serve science needs across the Department of Energy Office of Science and beyond.

Toward this end, NERSC's Advanced Technologies Group engages with other national labs, vendors, and the general research community to help define and evaluate technologies that enhance the effectiveness of HPC for scientific research. One of the group's current goals is to understand what the computing landscape will look like following the end of Moore’s Law and post-exascale. As scientific applications and workflows look to a future that incorporates increasingly data-intensive methodologies such as machine learning, deep learning, and quantum information systems, new opportunities for innovations in HPC system architectures that can increase post-exascale computing capabilities are being heartily debated.

Near term, specializations such as disaggregated architectures that decouple memory from processors and accelerators represent a promising shift that can meet the demands of next-generation workloads by allowing flexible node designs. Further out, we can expect to see semi-custom supercomputing systems targeted at high-value science problems, and heterogeneous integration of advanced semiconductor packaging techniques such as chiplets.

Together, these and multiple other advances will help lead us into the next generation of HPC for science.

For more information, contact:

Nick Wright, ATG group lead