HPCwire: Researchers Conduct Breakthrough Fusion Simulation

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

HPCwire >> Off the Wire

July 14, 2008

Researchers Conduct Breakthrough Fusion Simulation

Page: 1 of 2
1 | 2 All »

GTC consumes 93 percent of 263TF Jaguar

July 14 -- A team of researchers from the University of California-Irvine (UCI), in conjunction with staff at Oak Ridge National Laboratory's National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS), has just completed what it says is the largest run in fusion simulation history.

The team, led by Yong Xiao and Zhihong Lin of UCI, used 93 percent of the NCCS's flagship supercomputer Jaguar, a Cray XT4, with the classic fusion code GTC (Gyrokinetic Toroidal Code), the key production code of two fusion SciDAC projects (GPS-TTBP and GSEP).

The simulation primarily studied electron transport in ITER, a prototype fusion reactor now in development that is meant to test fusion's feasibility for commercial power production (because in ITER the fusion process will primarily heat electrons, electron transport will be more important compared to existing fusion devices). Fusion energy could one day provide the world with a cleaner, more abundant energy source with far fewer harmful emissions than fossil-fuel-burning power plants and fewer waste issues than current nuclear power production.

To successfully produce a fusion reaction, an extremely hot ionized gas known as a plasma must be confined magnetically for a sufficient period of time. Previous research has shown that heat transport for both the ions and the electrons in the plasma is far greater than theory predicts (the electron heat transport can be two orders of magnitude greater). This larger-than-expected heat transport could lead to confinement failure within one second, quickly rendering energy production impossible if reactor designs are not modified to accommodate it.

The researchers discovered, among other things, that for a device the size of ITER, the containment vessel will demonstrate GyroBohm scaling, meaning that the heat transport level is inversely proportional to the device size. In other words, the simulation supports the ITER design: a larger device will lead to more efficient confinement.

"The success of fusion research depends on good confinement of the burning plasma," said Xiao. "This simulation size is the one closest to ITER in terms of practical parameters and proper electron physics."

Because fusion simulation is such a complex process, today's leadership-class supercomputers such as Jaguar, with their fast CPU speeds and large memory, are an absolute necessity. GTC can effectively utilize large numbers of Jaguar's cores thanks to an efficient three-level parallelism (using both MPI and OpenMP) designed by Stephane Ethier (Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory) and Zhihong Lin.

However, the huge amounts of data produced by fusion simulations can create I/O nightmares: in one GTC run, the team can produce terabytes of data (in this case 60TB). To address this potential bottleneck, the team used ADIOS, a set of library files that allows for easy and fast file input and output, developed mainly by the NCCS's Scott Klasky and Chen Jin and Georgia Tech's Jay Lofstead and Karsten Schwan.

"This huge amount of data needs fast and smooth file writing and reading," said Xiao. "With poor I/O, the file writing takes up precious computer time and the parallel file system on machines such as Jaguar can choke. With ADIOS, the I/O was vastly improved, consuming less than 3 percent of run time and allowing the researchers to write tens of terabytes of data smoothly without file system failure."

Page: 1 of 2
1 | 2 All »

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

Chips Ahoy: Vendors Show Off Their Latest Silicon

Chipmakers converged on San Francisco this week to talk up their newest semiconductor products at the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC). Of particular interest to the HPC crowd are Intel's Westmere EP and "Tukwila" Itanium 9300, and IBM's POWER7.
Read More...

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...

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