HPCwire: ORNL-Led Team Takes Prize for World's Top Science App

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

HPCwire >> Topic >> Applications

November 19, 2009

ORNL-Led Team Takes Prize for World's Top Science App

Page: 1 of 2
1 | 2 All »

Second ORNL-led team also finalist for Gordon Bell Prize

Nov. 19 -- A team led by Oak Ridge National Laboratory's (ORNL's) Markus Eisenbach was named winner Thursday of the 2009 ACM Gordon Bell Prize, which honors the world's highest-performing scientific computing applications. Another team led by ORNL's Edo Aprà was also among nine finalists for the prize.

Results of the contest were announced in Portland, Ore., during the SC09 international supercomputing conference. The prize is supported by high-performance computing pioneer Gordon Bell and is administered by the Association for Computing Machinery.

Eisenbach and colleagues from ORNL, Florida State University, and the Institute for Theoretical Physics and Swiss National Supercomputing Center achieved 1.84 thousand trillion calculations per second -- or 1.84 petaflops -- using an application that analyzes magnetic systems and, in particular, the effect of temperature on these systems. By accurately revealing the magnetic properties of specific materials--even materials that have not yet been produced -- the project promises to boost the search for stronger, more stable magnets, thereby contributing to advances in such areas as magnetic storage and the development of lighter, stronger motors for electric vehicles.

The application -- known as WL-LSMS -- achieved this performance on ORNL's Cray XT5 Jaguar system, making use of more than 223,000 of Jaguar's 224,000-plus available processing cores and reaching nearly 80 percent of Jaguar's peak performance of 2.33 petaflops. Earlier in the week Jaguar was named number one on the TOP500 list of the world's fastest computers. The system was recently upgraded from four-core processors to six-core processors, boosting its peak performance to 2.33 petaflops.

WL-LSMS allows researchers to directly and accurately calculate the temperature above which a material loses its magnetism--known as the Curie temperature. The team's approach differs from earlier efforts because it sets aside empirical models and their attendant approximations to tackle the system through first-principles calculations.

"What we can do is calculate the Curie temperature for materials with high accuracy without external parameters," Eisenbach explained. "These first-principles calculations are orders of magnitude more computationally demanding than previous models; it's only with a petascale system such as Jaguar that calculations like this become feasible."

WL-LSMS combines two methods to achieve its goal. The first -- known as locally self-consistent multiple scattering, or LSMS -- applies density functional theory to solve the Dirac equation, a relativistic wave equation for electron behavior. The code has a robust history, having been the first code to run at a sustained trillion calculations per second, and earned its developers the prestigious 1998 Gordon Bell Prize. This approach, though, describes a system in its ground state at a temperature of absolute zero, or nearly -460°F. By incorporating a Monte Carlo method known as Wang-Landau, which guides the LSMS application, Eisenbach and his colleagues are able to explore technologically relevant temperatures ranges.

The work improves on previous advances in magnetic materials, Eisenbach said. He noted that materials research has led in the past century to more than a 50-fold increase in the magnetic strength of materials per volume and in the last decade to more than a 100-fold increase in the density of magnetic data storage. Other efforts that may benefit from the research include the design of lighter, more resilient steel and the development of future refrigerators that use magnetic cooling.

Aprà's team -- the other finalist led by an ORNL researcher -- achieved 1.39 petaflops on Jaguar in a first principles, quantum mechanical exploration of the energy contained in clusters of water molecules. The team, comprising members from ORNL, Australian National University, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), and Cray Inc., used a computational chemistry application known as NWChem, which was developed at PNNL.

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

Moscow State University Supercomputer Has Petaflop Aspirations

The Moscow State University supercomputer, Lomonosov, has been selected for a high-performance makeover, with the goal of tripling its processing power to achieve petaflop-level performance in 2010. T-Platforms, who developed and manufactured the supercomputer, is the odds-on favorite to lead the project.
Read More...

Intel Ups Performance Ante with Westmere Server Chips

Right on schedule, Intel has launched its Xeon 5600 processors, codenamed "Westmere EP." The 5600 represents the 32nm sequel to the Xeon 5500 (Nehalem EP) for dual-socket servers. Intel is touting better performance and energy efficiency, along with new security features, as the big selling points of the new Xeons.
Read More...

The Week in Review

The ACM Turing Award goes to the creator of the modern personal computer; and Voltaire announces a mid-range InfiniBand switch and new technology that accelerates distributed applications. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.
Read More...

Read more HPCwire features...

Top Headlines

AMD: OEMs primed for Opteron 6100s

Mar 17 | The Register | But what about the tier ones? Read more...

Arrival of the Desktop Supercomputer

Mar 17 | Cadalyst Magazine | A new generation of workstations is changing the nature of technical computing. Read more...

Scheduling HPC In The Cloud

Mar 17 | Linux Magazine | Latest iteration of Sun Grid Engine able to tap into Cloud. Read more...

Tailoring Medicine with Supercomputers

Mar 16 | Bio-IT World | Biotech firm builds genetic models from patient data. Read more...

Gelsinger Stuns Analysts and Colleagues with Storage Pool Plan

Mar 15 | The Register | EMC's grand vision for unified global storage. 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.

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