To Infinity and Beyond – New Frontiers for Exascale Supercomputers and DOE National Labs: A Virtual Briefing hosted by TFAI and the National Labs Caucus

Date: July 14, 2022
Time: 2:30 pm EDT

Recent years have seen rapid advancements in advanced computing, including the recent achievement of hitting exascale with Oak Ridge’s Frontier system. These breakthroughs are fueled by innovation and U.S. leadership grounded in long-standing U.S. government investments in R&D and STEM education. This briefing will examine the state of exascale computing in the U.S. and where it is headed. We’ll provide an overview of past breakthroughs and current cutting-edge research and show how those breakthroughs are being used in innovative, real-world applications and products. This briefing will also discuss the collaboration between the Department of Energy, Oak Ridge National Lab, HPE, and AMD and its recent successes.

Please register here.

Moderator

Jon Hoganson
Corporate Vice President
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) Inc.
Co-chair of TFAI

Jonathan Hoganson is AMD’s Corporate Vice President for Government Relations.  In this role he serves as the primary liaison between the company and key policymakers.  He overseas AMD’s Washington, DC office and US Government Relations Team.  Jon has more than 25 years of experience in politics and policy, including a decade in the semiconductor industry.  Prior to joining AMD, Jon managed government relations for Micron Technology.  A veteran of Capitol Hill, Jon also worked on numerous political campaigns from the local to national levels from 1994 to 2006.

Members of Congress

Rep. Chuck Fleischmann (R-TN3)

Congressman Chuck Fleischmann the 3rd District of Tennessee. He earned his undergraduate degree in political science from the University of Illinois. He received both Phi Beta Kappa and Magna Cum Laude honors. He then went to the University of Tennessee law school where he received his Doctor of Jurisprudence.

For 24 years Chuck and his wife ran a small business together in Chattanooga after they both graduated from law school at the University of Tennessee.

Rep. Fleischmann serves on the Appropriations Committee which is vitally important to the residents of the 3rd District.  Within the Committee he serves on three crucial subcommittees:

• Energy and Water Development, and Related Agencies
• Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies
• Homeland Security

His role on the Energy and Water Development, and Related Agencies subcommittee allows him to fight for funding for the Chickamauga Lock, a key East Tennessee infrastructure project. In addition, this subcommittee assignment is of paramount importance to the northern region of the Third District which is home to Oak Ridge National Lab, Y-12 National Security Complex, and a large environmental cleanup mission, all of which rely on funds appropriated by this subcommittee.

In the 117th Congress, Chuck was named Ranking Member on the Homeland Security Subcommittee. As the Ranking Member, or top Republican, Chuck leads the charge to provide funding for the government agencies that secure our homeland including the United States Coast Guard, Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA).

He lives in Ooltewah, Tennessee with his wife, Brenda, and three boys.

Rep. Bill Foster (D-IL11)

Congressman Bill Foster is a scientist and businessman representing the 11th Congressional District of Illinois, a position he’s held since 2013. He also represented the 14th Congressional District of Illinois from 2008 to 2011. He is the only PhD physicist in Congress.

Rep. Foster serves on the House Financial Services Committee where he advocates for consumer protections and an economy that works for everyone. He serves as chairman of the Financial Services Committee’s Task Force on Artificial Intelligence.

He also serves on the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee where he has fought for evidence-based policies and forward-thinking approaches to some of our country’s most pressing issues, including climate change and energy innovation. He is a champion for sustained federal funding for scientific research.

Rep. Foster serves as the chairman of the Science Committee’s Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee, which is empowered to investigate and oversee federal scientific research.

In the wake of the devastating COVID-19 pandemic, he was named to the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus. The Select Subcommittee is charged with examining the federal government’s response to the COVID-19 crisis, including the use of taxpayer funds to mitigate the public health and economic consequences of the pandemic.

His business career began at age 19 when he and his younger brother co-founded Electronic Theatre Controls, Inc., a company that now manufactures over half of the theater lighting equipment in the United States.

Before he became a Member of Congress, Rep. Foster worked as a high-energy physicist and particle accelerator designer at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab). He was a member of the team that discovered the top quark, the heaviest known form of matter. He also led the teams that designed and built several scientific facilities and detectors still in use today, including the Antiproton Recycler Ring, the latest of Fermilab’s giant particle accelerators.

He lives in Naperville with his wife Aesook, who is also a physicist and has two grown children.

 

Panelists

Mike Schulte
Senior Fellow for Silicon Engineering
AMD

Michael Schulte is a Senior Fellow with AMD Research, where he leads research, advanced development, and technology transfer activities in high-performance computing, machine learning, data analytics, heterogeneous systems, and power-efficient processors. He is currently AMD’s Chief Engineer for the Frontier and El Capitan exascale supercomputers. Michael was previously a Co-Principal Investigator and Technical Lead on AMD’s PathForward, FastForward-2 Node Architecture, and FastForward Extreme-scale Computing projects. Prior to joining AMD, he was a tenured faculty member at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Lehigh University.

Michael holds Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin, and a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Michael is an IEEE Fellow for contributions to compute architectures. He is the recipient of an NSF CAREER Award, the Alfred Noble Robinson Award, the AMD Next 5% Award, the AMD Way Award, and the AMD Datacenter and Embedded Solutions Group Award of Excellence. Throughout his career, Michael has had the honor of working with incredibly kind, smart, and talented people.

 

Doug Kothe
Associate Laboratory Director, Computing and Computational Sciences Directorate and Director, Exascale Computing Project
Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Douglas B. Kothe (Doug) has thirty-seven years of experience in conducting and leading applied R&D in computational science applications designed to simulate complex physical phenomena in the energy, defense, and manufacturing sectors. Doug is currently the Director of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Exascale Computing Project and Associate Laboratory Director of the Computing and Computational Sciences Directorate at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). Other positions for Doug at ORNL, where he has been since 2006, include Director of Science at the National Center for Computational Sciences (2006-2010) and Director of the Consortium for Advanced Simulation of Light Water Reactors (CASL), DOE’s first Energy Innovation Hub (2010-2015). In leading the CASL Hub, Doug drove the creation, application, and deployment of an innovative Virtual Environment for Reactor Applications (2016 R&D winner), which offered a technology step change for the US nuclear energy industry.

Before coming to ORNL, Doug spent 20 years at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he held a number of technical and line and program management positions, with a common theme being the development and application of modeling and simulation technologies targeting multi-physics phenomena characterized by the presence of compressible or incompressible interfacial fluid flow, where his field-changing accomplishments are known internationally. Doug also spent one year at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the late 1980s as a physicist in defense sciences. 

Doug holds a Bachelor in Science in Chemical Engineering from the University of Missouri – Columbia (1983) and a Masters in Science (1986) and Doctor of Philosophy (1987) in Nuclear Engineering from Purdue University.

 

Ron Bewtra
Director, Leadership Computing
Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Ron Bewtra is the Vertical Director for Leadership Computing at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). This vertical pertains to worldwide customers who are pushing the absolute limits of High Performance Computing. Mr. Bewtra is responsible for understanding the customer needs and vision, and HPE’s solutions in this space.

Prior to this position, Ron Bewtra served as the CTO of the US Department of Justice. In this role, Mr. Bewtra drove technology innovation and developed the Department’s technology roadmaps in the areas of AI, Data, Geospatial Capabilities, Cloud, and Networking. Mr. Bewtra also served as a chair of the Federal CIO Council’s Innovation Committee, chair of the Federal CTO Council, and chair of the Federal IPv6 Task Force.

Ron Bewtra previously served as the CTO of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). During his time at NOAA, Mr. Bewtra also led the agency’s research and development high performance computing.