2025 Energy HPC Conference

Aurora and Frontier are the nation’s first exascale computing systems for science and engineering, housed at Argonne and Oak Ridge National Laboratories’ Leadership Computing Facility sites, respectively. From the perspective of managing ALCF’s applications-readiness program for Aurora, the Early Science Program, and working within the Applications Integration component of the Department of Energy’s Exascale Computing Program, I will discuss experiences in developing and optimizing applications for these GPU-accelerated architectures. These applications span a wide range of science and engineering domains and include AI and data-intensive computing components—often together in multicomponent workflows. All of the project teams involved were motivated to maintain portability across both exascale platforms, as well as existing pre-exascale platforms. I will discuss their various chosen implementation means to do this, and some cross-cutting best practices.