ORNL: Troubleshooting Turbulence – the Next ‘Killer App’ for Exascale Supercomputing? Written 9 January 2025
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By Anne Wainscott-Sargent, AIAA Communications Team
ORLANDO, Fla. – The aerospace community got a rare look at the capabilities and processing might of the world’s first exascale supercomputer during a plenary session at the 2025 AIAA SciTech Forum.
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Taking the stage in Orlando, Bronson Messer II, director of science for the Leadership Computing Facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in eastern Tennessee, admitted that while he is an astrophysicist, not an engineer, he shares common interests with the AIAA community: namely, solving tough problems in a world where the pace of technology advances continues to slow – even as the need for smarter, more advanced problem-solving is accelerating.
“I’ve heard throughout my career that Moore’s Law is dead. It’s finally actually true. This…doubling of performance…every 18 months has hit the end of the road,” he explained.
Messer said Moore’s Law’s demise requires scientists to think about how they’re going to reformulate problems and solve them in a much different way. And one of the biggest technical challenges facing the aerospace engineering community is turbulence.
“Turbulence may be the killer app for exascale computers,” Messer said.
Turbulence has a complex and unpredictable nature, making it difficult to accurately model and predict. That’s especially true for "clear-air turbulence,” which is invisible to radar. A 2023 study found that aircraft turbulence soared by up to 55% and some regions, including North America, the north Atlantic, and Europe, are set to experience several hundred percent more turbulence in the coming decade.
Enter Frontier, ORNL’s exascale supercomputer, which became operational in 2022 with 100 times the computing power found in typical universities, labs, or industrial environments. It can process billions upon billions of operations per second. Frontier’s processing speed is so powerful, it would take every person on Earth combined more than four years to do what the supercomputer can in one second.
“Frontier has more in common with the Hubble Space Telescope or the Large Hadron Collider (a particle accelerator) than with your laptop,” Messer emphasized.
Messer shared how GE Aerospace did one of the largest turbulence simulations ever attempted to study ways to negate the effect of turbulence on commercial flights. NASA is leveraging Frontier to understand the role of turbulence in flying and landing on Mars.
Concluding his talk, Messer invited proposals year-round from the audience to get time on the Frontier system, which is open to U.S. and most global researchers with some exceptions. He cautioned that only projects with the right level of computing complexity will benefit from exascale computing.
During the Q&A he said that his team has concluded an RFP for Discovery, the next exascale supercomputer that will replace Frontier.
When asked about exascale computing’s role in quantum computing, Messer said, “I’m a quantum advocate. My suspicion is over the next decade quantum computing will make the biggest impact on what I would call quantum problems – problems like computational chemistry, which may have an impact on things like aerospace.” He said there is a small team at ONRL looking at doing compressible hydrodynamics using quantum computing.
“I think the ability to do that on a very large scale is a way off,” he concluded.
“It was a very interesting talk,” said forum attendee Mike Ferguson, a flight test engineer at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab in Maryland. “I definitely think there are problems at our lab that could use that kind of computing infrastructure, but it would take some investigating and some actual deep thinking from all of us to figure that out.”