Fast Forward

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).

 

FastForward 2 Contracts
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).

FastForward 1 Contracts
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.

 

Vendor News