NCCS Announces Early Petascale Applications
Jan 30th, 2009 in In The Spotlight
With the upgrade of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s (ORNL’s) Cray XT supercomputer known as Jaguar (http://www.nccs.gov/jaguar), high-performance computing (HPC) has entered the petascale. With a peak performance of 1.6 petaflops, Jaguar is now the most powerful computer in the world for open science and is the first to enter this new era, one that will certainly redefine the potential of HPC research.
To facilitate the most able codes and to test the mettle of the new system, ORNL’s National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS), which manages the machine, has granted early access to a number of projects that can utilize a majority of the machine and take it, and science, to their respective limits.
“The current plan is for the system to be used during the next several months for specific high-impact projects of national importance,” said NCCS Director of Science Doug Kothe in a recent interview featured on HPCwire. “We have three principal goals during the system’s early phase: deliver important, high-impact science results and advancements; harden the system for production; and embrace a broad user community capable of and prepared for using the system.”
This priority “Petascale Early Science” period will run approximately 6 months and consist initially of 20 projects, said Kothe, adding that a broad range of science, including climate, chemistry, biology, combustion, and materials science, will be explored.
The climate projects will incorporate atmospheric and oceanic elements and will produce results at higher resolutions, bringing researchers one step closer to understanding the dynamics of Earth’s complex climate system. Ultimately, the data gleaned from these allocations will provide policymakers with information with which to better plan for predicted future climate fluctuations, such as regional climate change on decadal time scales.
The featured chemistry proposal will focus on enhanced energy storage in nanostructured systems, which has the potential to revolutionize battery and related technologies; the biology proposal will explore a more efficient means of converting cellulose to ethanol, a process that could one day make economically feasible biofuels a reality; combustion research will dissect the properties of ignition and flame dynamics, paving the way for more efficient future engines; and the materials science effort will use the classic Hubbard model for the design of high-temperature superconductors, a technology that could increase the efficiency of transmitting electricity several times over.
Fusion, nuclear energy, materials science, nuclear physics, astrophysics, and geosciences (exploring carbon sequestration) will also be explored.
“We expect these projects to deliver important results. Since they will be led by the community’s most sophisticated users and prominent scientists, early simulations on Jaguar will also help us harden the system for a broader collection of projects later in the year,” said Kothe, referring to the upcoming Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) projects hosted annually by the NCCS.
These early pioneering research applications will push computational science to new limits, giving researchers a peek at the possibilities of petascale simulation and prepping Jaguar for the nearly 40 INCITE projects that will explore domains from biology to fusion energy in unprecedented detail. Now that the petascale era has finally arrived, the work begins.
