An Exascale Day Interview with the Director of DOE’s Exascale Computing Project
Source: Exascale Computing Project.org | Interview | October 17, 2021
As the US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Exascale Computing Project (ECP) rolls into its sixth year, ECP Director Doug Kothe continues to propel the effort, drawing on the deep well of experience he has filled during three and a half decades of leading programs and building and overseeing highly specialized teams at DOE labs.
ECP’s first director, Paul Messina, recruited Doug. Just before joining ECP, Kothe was the Deputy Associate Laboratory Director of the Computing and Computational Sciences Directorate at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). During his fifteen years at ORNL, Doug has also served as Director of Science at the National Center for Computational Sciences (2006–2010) and Director of the Consortium for Advanced Simulation of Light Water Reactors (CASL), DOE’s first Energy Innovation Hub (2010–2015). In leading the CASL hub, Doug drove the creation, application, and deployment of an innovative Virtual Environment for Reactor Applications (a 2016 R&D 100 Award winner), which offered a large and sudden technology change for the US nuclear energy industry.