BERLIN, Germany, July 3 — Users of GCS HPC system SuperMUC of the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre Garching/Munich have been awarded once again at this year’s International Supercomputing Conference in Leipzig. The PRACE-ISC Award 2014 was presented to a team of scientists for their seismic science project “SeisSol”. Using all 147,456 compute cores of HPC system SuperMUC the research team achieved a sustained system performance of 1.09 Petaflops for a 3+ hours run of “SeisSol”, simulating the Earth’s vibrations inside the complex structured volcano Merapi on the Java island.

Supported by the experts of the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ), computer scientists, mathematicians, and geophysicists of the Technische Universität München (TUM) and the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU) collectively optimised and completely parallelised the 70,000 lines of code of SeisSol, a software to simulate earth quakes, to optimally leverage the parallel architecture of SuperMUC. The collaborative effort under leadership of Prof. Dr. Michael Bader (TUM) and Dr. Christian Pelties of the Department of Geo and Environmental Sciences at LMU resulted in achieving a SeisSol application performance of 1.42 Petaflops for a weak scaling test which corresponds to 44.5% of SuperMUC’s peak processing performance. For the entire simulation run, which took about 3 hours of computing time on the LRZ supercomputer, a sustained system performance of 1.09 Petaflops was achieved.

“We cannot stress enough to point out how collaborative efforts of scientists of various fields can lead to substantial success”, notes Professor Arndt Bode, Director of the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre. “The sustained Petaflops performance obtained in this earthquake simulation could only be achieved through the optimal cooperation of specialists from Geophysics, Computer Science, and from the Supercomputing Centre as put into practise at LRZ’s Extreme Scaling workshops and through LRZ’s partnership initiatives,“ affirms Professor Bode.

The basis of the optimization of this simulation run was laid at an Extreme Scaling Workshop held earlier at LRZ, where programmers of the most advanced applications running on SuperMUC together with LRZ’s staff jointly worked on optimizing and further parallelizing the codes. At a second Extreme Scaling Workshop, twelve invited international participants worked for an entire week at LRZ to get their 8 application programs efficiently utilizing all 147,456 compute cores of SuperMUC in parallel. The result: Six of the eight application codes were able to start on the whole computer and run without any problems.

About LRZ and SuperMUC

The Leibniz Supercomputing Centre in Garching near Munich is one of the three member centres of GCS. LRZ runs a System X iDataPlex from IBM code named SuperMUC, which is not only one of the fastest, but also one of the most energy efficient supercomputers in the world. With a PUE value of 1.1, the LRZ system claims fame for being on the forefront of Green IT efforts (Greengineering) in data centres. An innovative new form of hot water cooling technology implemented by IBM takes credit for this achievement. The Intel processors and the system software running on SuperMUC offer further opportunities to save energy. Thanks to all these measures, the total energy consumption was drastically reduced to crunching 0.86 gigaflops for every watt consumed – a ratio currently unmatched by any other HPC system of comparable architecture.

About GCS

The Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS) combines the three national supercom- puting centres HLRS (High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart), JSC (Jülich Supercomputing Centre), and LRZ (Leibniz Supercomputing Centre, Garching near Munich) into Germany’s Tier-0 supercomputing institution. Concertedly, the three centres provide the largest and most powerful supercomputing infrastructure in all of Europe to serve a wide range of industrial and research activities in various disciplines. They also provide top-class training and education for the national as well as the European High Performance Computing (HPC) community. GCS is the German member of PRACE (Partnership for Advance Computing in Europe), an international non-profit association consisting of 25 member countries, whose representative organizations create a pan-European supercomputing infrastructure, providing access to computing and data management resources and services for large-scale scientific and engineering applications at the highest performance level.

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Source: GCS