The FastForward objective is to initiate partnerships with multiple companies to accelerate the R&D of critical component technologies needed for extreme-scale computing. This public-private partnership between industry, the DOE Office of Science, and NNSA supports the development of technology that reduces economic and manufacturing barriers to constructing exaflop-sustained systems. The selected technologies have the potential to impact low-power embedded, cloud/datacenter, and mid-range HPC applications, thus ensuring that DOE/NNSA investment furthers a sustainable software/hardware ecosystem supported by applications across the HPC market and the broader IT industry.
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DOE FastForward Program Managers
Dr. William Harrod
Research Division Director
Advanced Scientific Computing Research
Thuc Hoang
Computational Systems and Software Environment
Facility Operations and User Support Program Manager
Office of Advanced Simulation and Computing
FastForward-2 Contracts Awarded
Following the successful award of the first FastForward partnership, the U.S. DOE Office of Science and the NNSA issued a FastForward 2 RFP to further develop extreme scale supercomputer technology. The process awarded $99.2M in contracts to five U.S. companies. Proposals were evaluated by representatives from DOE and seven NNSA labs—Argonne (ANL), Los Alamos (LANL), Lawrence Berkeley (LBNL), Lawrence Livermore (LLNL), Oak Ridge (ORNL), Pacific Northwest (PNNL), and Sandia (SNL).
| Company | R&D Scope |
|---|---|
| AMD Advanced Research | Memory research/node research |
| IBM Corporation | Memory research |
| Intel Federal LLC | Node research |
| NVIDIA Corporation | Node research |
| Cray | Node research |
FastForward 1 Contracts Awarded
The FastForward 1 process awarded $62.5M in contracts to five (now four) U.S. companies. Proposals were evaluated by representatives from DOE and seven NNSA labs—Argonne (ANL), Los Alamos (LANL), Lawrence Berkeley (LBNL), Lawrence Livermore (LLNL), Oak Ridge (ORNL), Pacific Northwest (PNNL), and Sandia (SNL).
| Company | Contract Award | R&D Scope |
|---|---|---|
| AMD Advanced Research | $12,600,000 | Processor/Memory |
| IBM Corporation | $10,476,714 | Memory |
| Intel Federal LLC | $18,963,437 | Processor/Memory |
| NVIDIA Corporation | $12,398,893 | Processor |
| Whamcloud Inc. (now Intel Federal LLC) | $7,996,053 | Storage and I/O |
Individual vendor presentations from the NNSA ASC 2014 PI Meeting, held on February 27, 2014, are available under Vendor News.
