The Chemistry and Physics Department continues its seminar series with a visit from Dr. Ada Sedova, an Associate Research Scientist in the Molecular Biophysics Group at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.  Join us for the seminar in Grove 411 at 3:00 pm

Abstract:

What is HPC, and how can it be used in the physical and chemical sciences?

In this seminar, I will give an introduction to high performance computing (HPC) at the "leadership scale," what we call the supercomputing facilities at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) within the OLCF, the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, and how leadership HPC is used in scientific computing efforts within the chemical and physical sciences. 

The OLCF has housed four top-ranked Top500 supercomputers since its founding in 1992. The Top500 project ranks the fastest supercomputers in the world. Traditionally, scientific computing using HPC involved running one parallel program at a time, with each program using a large portion of a supercomputer to help make a large calculation run much faster than it would have in serial. Recently, with the use of deep learning in scientific computing, workflows run on supercomputers may have multiple different programs running in complex, asynchronous pipelines, including iterative training, verification, and data generation steps.

After a brief introduction to parallel computing and hardware, and deep learning, the talk will give examples of the different ways that I and my colleagues at ORNL have used HPC to solve problems in biophysics, biochemistry, chemistry and materials sciences.