ACADEMIA

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has announced a Request for Proposals (RFP) for extreme-scale supercomputing research and development under an initiative called FastForward.

About $60 million will be available over two years for accelerated research and development (R&D) in three technology areas: processors; memory; and storage.

FastForward is jointly funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science (SC) and the National Nuclear Security Administration. Lawrence Livermore (LLNL) is representing seven DOE laboratories and the DOE as the Source Selection Official for this RFP.

FastForward seeks partnerships with multiple high performance supercomputing companies to accelerate the R&D of technologies critical to the advancement of extreme-scale supercomputing. Many DOE and NNSA applications place extreme requirements on computations, data movement, and reliability.

DOE’s strategic plan calls for ensuring America’s security and prosperity by using transformative science and technology to address the nation’s energy, environmental, and nuclear challenges. This includes advancing simulation-based scientific discovery by investing in applied mathematics, computer science, and networking tools. These investments will enable the research required to develop exascale supercomputing platforms and the software environment needed to support DOE energy, science, and security missions. Critical to this R&D effort is the aggressive pursuit of energy-efficient high performance supercomputing systems.

This initiative was born of the recognition that the broader computing market will drive innovation in a direction that may not meet the needs of DOE's mission needs. FastForward seeks to fund innovative new and/or accelerated R&D of technologies targeted for use in the next 5–10 years.

For more information, see the RFP Website: https://asc.llnl.gov/fastforward/