National Center for Computational Sciences

A team led by Thomas Schulthess of Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has broken the petaflop barrier with a supercomputing application likely to accelerate the revolution in magnetic storage.

Using ORNL’s upgraded Cray XT Jaguar supercomputer, the team was able to achieve a sustained performance of 1.05 quadrillion calculations a second, or 1.05 petaflops, for an application that simulates the behavior of electron systems. Jaguar itself was recently upgraded to a peak performance of 1.64 petaflops, making it the world’s first petaflop system dedicated to open scientific research. The team’s simulation ran on nearly 150,000 of Jaguar’s 180,000-plus processing cores.

Among its benefits, the application promises to advance scientific understanding of magnetic devices such as computer hard drives. In the last couple of decades, hard drive storage capacity has grown at an extraordinary rate. The associated risk, though, is that with increasing storage density these amazing devices tend to become less stable.

Hard drives hold information by magnetizing tiny regions of a platter, with regions magnetized in one direction counting as ones and in the opposite direction as zeroes. With the exponential growth of storage capacity, these miniscule spots have gotten progressively even smaller; and the smaller the spot, the more likely its magnetic direction is to be incorrectly and unexpectedly reversed. Since disorder at the atomic scale increases with temperature, a hard drive kept as warm as room temperature becomes increasingly susceptible to random changes–meaning lost data–as storage density rises.

Continue reading at HPCwire.com.