HPCwire: ORNL's Jaguar Fastest for Fusion Turbulence Simulations

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October 06, 2006

ORNL's Jaguar Fastest for Fusion Turbulence Simulations

Oak Ridge National Laboratory's (ORNL's) Cray XT3 supercomputer, known as Jaguar, has become the fastest system in the world for running the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory's (PPPL's) flagship code for studying plasma microturbulence in fusion reactors.

PPPL's Stephane Ethier recently succeeded in running the Gyrokinetic Toroidal Code (GTC) on 10,386 of Jaguar's 10,424 processing cores, advancing 5.4 billion particles per step per second. That performance is a 13 percent improvement over the previous record of 4.8 billion particles per step per second set on Japan's Earth Simulator.

Ethier noted that GTC is one of only a few U.S. codes that have been benchmarked on the Earth Simulator. The Earth Simulator benchmark used up to 4096 processors.

Ethier said he is especially pleased with the efficiency at which the code was able to run on Jaguar's dual-core processors. "With regard to the increasing current emphasis on multi-core architectures," he said, "GTC has demonstrated better than 95 percent efficiency on the second processor of each dual-code node in these runs."

The Princeton researcher noted that the effort received substantial collaboration from staff at ORNL's National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS).

"PPPL is most grateful to the staff of NCCS and especially to Scott Klasky and Don Maxwell for their extraordinary supporting efforts, which helped enable the timely achievement of these highly productive runs," Ethier said.

The milestone puts scientists a step closer to accurately simulating plasma behavior in fusion reactors such as the proposed ITER reactor, currently a top priority of the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science. The ITER project is geared toward reaching the fusion energy break-even point, getting more energy out of the reactor than goes into it.

PPPL chief scientist Williams Tang said the run on Jaguar was able to reach an extremely high statistical resolution, noting that the field of fusion simulation will continue to benefit as petascale computing systems become available.

"The ability to carry out such high-resolution calculations with associated very low noise levels enables better physics understanding of turbulent plasma behavior on realistic time scales characteristic of actual experimental observations," he said. "It holds great promise for accelerating the pace of greater scientific discovery at the petascale range and beyond."

Turbulence is believed to be the primary mechanism by which particles and energy leave the confining magnetic field of a doughnut-shaped fusion system, leading to a loss of energy in the system. According to Tang, the process of designing and operating a reactor such as ITER must take this phenomenon into account. GTC is a three-dimensional code developed to study the dynamics of turbulence and associated transport driven by variations of temperature and density within the system.

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Source: Oak Ridge National Laboratory

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