HPCwire: ORNL's Jaguar Fastest for Fusion Turbulence Simulations

The Leading Source for Global News and Information Covering the Ecosystem of High Productivity Computing

HPCwire >> Off the Wire

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.

-----

Source: Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Article Tools

Share Options

(Digg, Technorati, more)

Subscribe

Subscribe to HPCwire

Discussion

There are 0 discussion items posted.

Join the Discussion

You must be a registered user in order to comment on HPCwire stories.

Members enjoy:

	Access to Special Content, including Podcasts, Webcasts, and Whitepapers and more!
	Ability to take an active role in the discussions that are shaping the HPC technology discipline!
	Special offers available only to HPCwire members!

Become a Registered User Today!

Registered Users Log in Here to Comment

Email Address:	Password (case sensitive)

Remember me	Forgot Password?

RSS Feeds

Feeds by Topic

Feeds by Industry

Feeds by Content Type

Feature Articles

The Week in Review

TACC's Ranger supercomputer celebrates its second year of enabling important research; Microsoft partners with NSF to bring cloud services to researchers; and NSF submits its fiscal year 2011 budget request. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.
Read More...

NASA Looks to Move Science Apps Into the Cloud

It seems only natural that the US space agency would be casting its eyes toward the clouds. Sure enough, NASA is now looking to cloud computing to optimize the operation of the agency's IT infrastructure for some of its science codes. Like many commercial businesses and government organizations, NASA is being asked to do more computing with fewer datacenter resources.
Read More...

Thoughts, Observations, Beliefs & Opinions About the NSF Supercomputer Centers

There is no such thing as an NSF (Supercomputer) Center and there never has been. There should be. What there are, in the words of Ed Hayes, then comptroller of NSF, are "NSF ASSISTED Supercomputer Centers." This is a double edged sword.
Read More...

Read more HPCwire features...

Top Headlines

IBM Releases Energy Efficient Power7 System

Feb 09 | eWeek Europe | Company says new high-end servers will deliver "intelligent performance." Read more...

Inductive Coupling Packs Flash Drive in a Chip

Feb 09 | EE Times | Wireless technology promises energy-efficient chip-to-chip communication. Read more...

IBM, Microsoft Help Create Montana Supercomputer

Feb 08 | eWeek | A new kind of Rocky Mountain high. Read more...

AMD Aims for GPUs in Mainstream Servers Starting 2012

Feb 08 | Computerworld | Chip maker hopes to bring CPU-GPU processors to servers in two years. Read more...

Graphene Transistors That Work at Blistering Speeds

Feb 05 | Technology Review | IBM has created graphene transistors that leave silicon ones in the dust. Read more...

Read more headlines...

Featured Whitepapers

Virtualization for Aggregation And The vSMP Architecture™

Jan 12 | | In-depth look at vSMP Foundation server virtualization technology, technical implementation, use cases and capabilities. The technical whitepaper provides an architectural overview and details on the three vSMP Foundation products: vSMP Foundation for SMP, vSMP Foundation for Cluster and vSMP Foundation for Cloud.

Copper Cable Technologies for High Performance Computing

Jan 18 | | This white paper discusses Gore’s copper cable assemblies, and how they continue to exceed the standards for providing reliable, cost-effective solutions for high-performance computer applications.

Appro Assists LLNL with Cluster Designed for Extreme Scale Visualization

Jan 11 | | LLNL is home to some of the fastest computers in the world. In 2012, LLNL expects to have the Sequoia supercomputing cluster operational with a projected performance of over 20 PFLOP/s. These systems will focus on strengthening the foundations of predictive simulation through running large suites of complex simulations and then comparing model predictions with experimental data. To visualize this project’s large amount of data, LLNL requested an Appro Supercomputing Cluster specifically designed to support interactive data analysis.

View the White Paper Library

Multimedia

Webcast: Virtualized Data Center Roundtable

Join this online panel discussion for live Q&A with leading industry experts, analysts, and end-users to discuss the latest innovations, best practices, barriers to implementation, and measurable benefits of server virtualization with a particular focus on today's real world solutions.

Webcast: Watch SC09 Birds of a Feather Video: Scalable Fault-Tolerant HPC Supercomputers

Learn about scalable fault-tolerant architectures and examples of energy efficient and scalable supercomputing clusters using dual QDR InfiniBand to combine capacity computing with network failover capabilities with the help of programming languages such as MPI and a robust Linux cluster management package.

Webcast: High Performance Computing for a Smarter Planet

LIVE@SCO9: The IBM team discusses new innovations in hardware, software and services that help clients better understand their workloads and get insight from their R&D efforts. Technology demonstrations include the soon-to-be-released Power7 HPC processor, the DCS990 system with 2.4 petabytes of storage, the xCAT management tool, secure HPC cloud computing and more. Winners of two HPCwire Readers' and Editors’ Choice Awards! Take the IBM virtual tour at SC09 or more information go online to: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/deepcomputing/sc09.html