The mission of the US Department of Energy (DOE) Exascale Computing Project (ECP) was initiated in 2016 as a formal DOE project and extends through 2022. The ECP is designing the software infrastructure to enable the next generation of supercomputers—systems capable of more than 1018 operations per second—to effectively and efficiently run applications that address currently intractable problems of strategic importance. The ECP is creating and deploying an expanded and vertically integrated software stack on US Department of Energy (DOE) HPC exascale and pre-exascale systems, thereby defining the enduring US exascale ecosystem.
The project is a joint effort of two DOE programs: the Office of Science Advanced Scientific Computing Research Program and the National Nuclear Security Administration Advanced Simulation and Computing Program. ECP's RD&D activities, which encompass the development of applications, software technologies, and hardware technologies and architectures, is carried out by over 100 small teams of scientists and engineers from the DOE national laboratories, universities, and industry.
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Douglas B. Kothe (Doug) has over three decades of experience in conducting and leading applied R&D in computational applications designed to simulate complex physical phenomena in the energy, defense, and manufacturing sectors. Doug is currently the Director of the Exascale Computing Project (ECP). Prior to that, he was Deputy Associate Laboratory Director of the Computing and Computational Sciences Directorate (CCSD) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). Other prior positions for Doug at ORNL, where he has been since 2006, include Director of the Consortium for Advanced Simulation of Light Water Reactors, DOE’s first Energy Innovation Hub (2010-2015), and Director of Science at the National Center for Computational Sciences (2006-2010).
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 in part by the presence of compressible or incompressible interfacial fluid flow. 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.
