HPCwire: HPC User Forum Wrap-Up

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October 12, 2007

HPC User Forum Wrap-Up

by John E. West, Senior Fellow, DoD HPC Modernization Program

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Industry research group IDC hosts five to six User Forum meetings around the world each year. About 100 people participated in the most recent meeting, representing government, industry and academia, as well as all the major HPC vendors. Each User Forum has a theme; this one focused on the use of HPC in the energy industry.

What follows is a subjective selection of highlights and topics of potential general interest from this meeting, which took place in Santa Fe, N.M. on Sept. 26-27.

The Keynote

The meeting keynote was delivered by Victor Reis, Senior Advisor, Office of the Secretary, Department of Energy. He has primary responsibility for the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, part of President George W. Bush's Advanced Energy Initiative, and he is also a member Strategic Advisory Group of the U.S. Strategic Command. Reis was the Director, Defense Research and Engineering when the DoD's High Performance Modernization Program started, and he was a senior official at DOE when it began the ASCI (Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative) program.

Reis reviewed the history of ASCI and what it has accomplished to date, and then discussed a potential new DOE program involving physics-based design of nuclear reactors for peaceful energy production. He feels that the timing is correct for instituting a new HPC program for this purpose and is gathering information to support such a program. He mentioned several potential modeling efforts that would contribute to the program, such as optimization of the nuclear reactor fuel cycle, design and qualification of new nuclear fuels, detailed modeling of new reactor designs, and environmental effects on nuclear reactors, particularly earthquakes. Several DOE talks followed which discussed modeling of fission reactors and the status of nuclear fusion research.

Energy-Related Discussions

The theme of this meeting was HPC in energy, so naturally there were several discussions of advanced energy research in addition to coverage in the keynote.

Keith Gray of BP discussed their seismic imaging research and development, which is designed to improve the information content of seismic images by processing with HPC capabilities. He specified several basic computational challenges and requirements: large-memory nodes for development work, easier parallel tools, effective use of emerging multicore systems, and bigger and better file systems.

Mark Nimlos of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory discussed the status of various forms of alternative energy sources and concentrated on his work in the biofuels program, which has a goal of replacing 30 percent of current transportation fuels with biofuels by 2030. He is carrying out sophisticated molecular dynamics computations of how one of the key enzymes breaks down cellulose into sugars, with the intent of understanding how to optimize the process.

Pratul Agarwal of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, working in the same overall program, discussed the multiscale nature of biofuel processing and the need for collaborative efforts between experimental and computational work. His group is considering the use of new HPC technologies such as FPGAs and GPUs to accelerate the computation of the enzymatic pathways involved in the conversions of cellulose to sugars. He noted that the follow-on processing of sugars to alcohols (fermentation) was well understood, at least at the production level, because of the many thousands of years of experimentation by human beings in this process.

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