HPCwire honors ORNL and its partners for advancing open-source software and high-performance computing technologies that drive U.S. innovation
Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have been honored with a 2025 HPCwire Readers’ Choice Award for Best HPC Collaboration (Academia/Government/Industry), recognizing the laboratory’s leadership and partnership in advancing high performance computing technologies that support national priorities in energy, security and scientific innovation.
The award was presented at the 2025 International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC25) in St. Louis, Missouri. Now in its 22nd year, the annual HPCwire Readers’ and Editors’ Choice Awards celebrate excellence and innovation in the global high performance computing community. Winners are selected through nominations and votes from the worldwide HPCwire readership, along with evaluations by the publication’s editorial team.
Leading ORNL’s contribution to the recognized collaboration is Damien Lebrun-Grandie, a senior computational scientist whose team plays a key role in the High-Performance Software Foundation (HPSF). The foundation unites government, academic and industry partners to develop and sustain critical open-source software that supports the HPC and AI ecosystem. ORNL is a founding member of HPSF, working alongside Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories to establish the organization.
“We are honored to receive this HPCwire Readers’ Choice Award, which underscores the crucial importance of community-driven efforts like the High-Performance Software Foundation (HPSF),” said Lebrun-Grandie. “Our collaboration ensures that the essential open-source software underpinning both traditional HPC and AI-driven science is robust and reliable. This recognition belongs to all the HPSF partners who are collectively driving the future of scientific discovery.”
Lebrun-Grandie serves on the HPSF Governing Board, while he and fellow ORNL researcher Ken Moreland represent the laboratory on the Technical Advisory Board, supporting key software projects such as Kokkos. Additional ORNL researchers, including Daniel Arndt and Jakob Bludau, contribute to the foundation’s focus on continuous integration of working groups benchmarking and software optimization.
Many of HPSF’s projects, such as Spack, Modules, HPCToolkit, Trilinos and Kokkos, are deployed and heavily used on ORNL’s Frontier supercomputer at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, one of the world’s fastest and most powerful AI-enabled supercomputing systems. Frontier continues to serve as a platform for groundbreaking scientific discovery, earning multiple Association for Computing Machinery Gordon Bell Awards for its AI-driven research achievements.
“While early advances in applying AI to science and engineering are producing exciting and impressive results, traditional HPC continues to drive breakthrough discoveries for mission-critical workloads and applications,” said Tom Tabor, CEO of TCI Media, publisher of HPCwire. “The 2025 Readers’ and Editors’ Choice Awards truly capture this dynamic era of innovation.”
Since 1979, ORNL has been a global leader in artificial intelligence and high-performance computing, conducting pioneering research that accelerates discovery and strengthens U.S. leadership in energy, security and innovation. The laboratory is poised to extend that leadership through new initiatives supported by the federal government, including the American Science Cloud and Lux, a next-generation AI-focused supercomputer scheduled for deployment in early 2026.
UT-Battelle manages ORNL for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science, the largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. The Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit energy.gov/science. — Mark Alewine
