PSU English professor to lift curtain on one of world’s most powerful supercomputers

(Press-News.org) Supercomputers are the largest and most powerful computers in the world and yet few people know what they do or why they should care. That’s why an English professor at Portland State is helping to demystify one of the world’s fastest and largest supercomputers with a grant from the National Science Foundation.

Sarah Read, an associate professor and director of PSU’s Technical and Professional Writing program, is teaming up with Clemson University’s Jordan Frith to give the public a better understanding of Aurora, which is expected to become one of the world’s most powerful public supercomputers.

Based at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) near Chicago, Aurora became the second exascale supercomputer ever, meaning it’s capable of quintillion (that’s a billion billions) calculations a second. It’s built to tackle a wide range of scientific problems, including designing more efficient airplanes, investigating the mysteries of the cosmos, modeling the impacts of climate change and accelerating the discovery of new materials.

It’s not every day that two English professors are awarded a grant from the science-focused NSF — Read is among the few, if not the first, at PSU — but technical writing can help simplify complex topics like supercomputers. Read is building on research that she did in 2014-2016 when she was a guest faculty researcher at the ALCF. A previous generation supercomputer was in use and she talked to staff members about an annual report they prepared for their funder that turned out to be a key organizing principle for the operations of the supercomputing facility.

“It’s amazing to think of a boring report that everyone hates writing having such a profound influence on organizational structures and processes,” she said. “It changes how we think about technical writing, in a good way.”

This time around, Read and Frith’s research will answer questions like: How do you build a supercomputer? What does a supercomputer do? What do scientists and other staff do all day at the supercomputing center? What does the supercomputer do that affects me? Why does the U.S. need the fastest supercomputers?

The pair will conduct observational and interview research with individuals and processes related to Aurora, including Argonne employees working on Aurora and scientists running projects on Aurora. One of the pair’s focuses will be the user documentation that supports scientists in preparing their projects to run on the supercomputer.

“User documentation is particularly interesting when the technology in use is the first of its kind and is incredibly complex — that is, nobody really knows how it works and how it works is always changing,” Read said. “So by talking to users about their experiences using and also creating the documentation, we'll also get direct insight into the unknowns and uncertainties of using a supercomputer at the bleeding edge and how that edge shapes researchers' science.”

The first phase will focus on the everyday practices of supercomputing and how a big science project is used and maintained through the work of scientists, operations staff and technical documentation processes. The second phase will move into higher-level examinations of how the global competition for supercomputing leadership has been shaped by, and also shapes, the U.S.’s identity as a leader in scientific and technological advancement.

“One of our broader research questions looks at how exascale computing changes possibilities for science within the context of the dynamic geopolitical race for supercomputing power,” Read said.

The grant will provide opportunities for both undergraduate and graduate students at PSU and Clemson to work with the U.S. National Laboratory system and learn about the world of public supercomputing as both research assistants and interns. Just this summer, a technical writing master’s student landed a writing internship at ALCF that came out of Read’s long standing relationship with the facility.

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