NCSA Researchers Use Blue Waters Supercomputer to Understand Earth’s Geomagnetism

September 26, 2019

September 26, 2019 — Deep in the center of the Earth is a fluid outer core that generates Earth’s magnetic field like a magnet with its two magnetic poles aligning closely to the geographic north and south poles. This alignment has been long used by mankind for navigation. But the magnetic field of the Earth plays a far more critical role in protecting the Earth’s habitats, by providing a strong magnetic shield to deflect solar wind, coronal mass ejection and solar energetic particles.

But the Earth’s core is not a conventional magnet, its magnetic field, called the geomagnetic field, changes substantially in both space and time, due to a turbulent dynamo action within the core. Thus it is very challenging to accurately predict geomagnetic variations in even several years in future. Dr. Nikolaos Pavlis, a scientist with the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, and Dr. Weijia Kuang, a geophysicist in the Geodesy & Geophysics Lab at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, have been using the Blue Waters supercomputer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois to learn more about geomagnetic variations and their underlying mechanisms, so that better forecasting models can be developed. Dr. Kuang recently answered some questions about this research via email.

Q: What can you tell about your research?

A: The collaboration that we are working on is in the area of geomagnetism, an important discipline of Earth science. The research goal of this collaboration is, in one sentence, utilizing geomagnetic observations and geodynamo models to make accurate forecasts of geomagnetic temporal variation on five-year to 20-year time scales. To reach this goal, we focus first on numerically understanding the forecast accuracy convergence with the ensemble size used for the ensemble Kalman filter type algorithm employed in our system.

There are a lot of technical details embedded in the above short description. Therefore I am writing a few more details and hope they are helpful. It is well known that Earth possesses a strong magnetic field (called the geomagnetic field) in much of its history (~ 4.5 billion years). This field is dominantly dipolar at the Earth’s surface and aligns approximately with the spin axis of the Earth, making the two poles pointing approximately to north and south, respectively. The fields are similar to the magnetic fields of a simple bar magnet. This north-south alignment has been used by mankind for navigation for several thousands of years.

Like many other geophysical quantities, the geomagnetic field changes in time and in space. Its changes in time are called “secular variation” (SV). Such changes are due to vigorous fluid motion, called convection, in the Earth’s fluid outer core which is approximately 3000 km below the surface.

The fundamental geodynamical process governing the core convection and the geomagnetic field is called “geodynamo.” At present, numerical modeling is the main tool to understand this dynamical process, its consequence on geomagnetic variation that is observable at the Earth’s surface, and its relevance to Earth’s evolution on geological time scales. Effort on accurate forecast of SV serves both the fundamental science and societal application needs.

Q. How are you using Blue Waters for this research?

A: We use Blue Waters for two main research tasks: (1) obtaining large ensemble of high-resolution geodynamo simulation solutions; and for (2) testing of forecast accuracy convergence with the ensemble size. These two can provide the knowledge on optimal ensemble sizes for geomagnetic forecast with given numerical resolutions and forecast accuracies. As you will find in the answers to the next two questions, the optimal ensemble size ensures cost-effective means for our research.

Q. How many cores are you using on Blue Waters? How long do your runs take?

A: Our project is computationally expensive. If we use 128 cores as the nominal usage for a single geodynamo simulation run, then 512 simultaneous runs will use 65,536 cores (or 2,048 nodes). However, due to research and technical reasons, we have tested so far only 1,024 cores (32 nodes).

Q. Would this research be possible without Blue Waters?

A. One main bottleneck of our research is the computing resource, in particular the CPU time. A typical geodynamo simulation requires ~ 1013 floating-point operations or “flops” with our current numerical resolution (100100100 in the three-dimensional space) and will require 1017 flops (100 petaflops) if higher resolutions are used for “Earth-like” parameters. Geomagnetic data assimilation can require three orders of magnitude more CPU time with ~1,000 ensemble members. If we look at it from the wall-clock time perspective, a single geodynamo simulation run can take up to two weeks (depending on numerical resolution and number of nodes used) on Blue Waters. Therefore, an ensemble of 512 simulation runs (which is expected to be typical) could last 10 years if they were executed sequentially. Blue Waters will enable us to have the entire ensemble runs executed simultaneously (parallel computation), thus allowing assimilation runs completed in the time frame comparable to that of a single run. Without Blue Waters (or any comparable computing facilities), we would have to scale back our ensemble size in order to complete all simulations within a reasonable time frame. This will certainly limit our ability to achieve meaningful research and application goals.

About NCSA

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign provides supercomputing and advanced digital resources for the nation’s science enterprise. At NCSA, University of Illinois faculty, staff, students, and collaborators from around the globe use advanced digital resources to address research grand challenges for the benefit of science and society. NCSA has been advancing one third of the Fortune 50® for more than 30 years by bringing industry, researchers, and students together to solve grand challenges at rapid speed and scale.


Source: NCSA

Subscribe to HPCwire's Weekly Update!

Be the most informed person in the room! Stay ahead of the tech trends with industry updates delivered to you every week!

MLPerf Inference 4.0 Results Showcase GenAI; Nvidia Still Dominates

March 28, 2024

There were no startling surprises in the latest MLPerf Inference benchmark (4.0) results released yesterday. Two new workloads — Llama 2 and Stable Diffusion XL — were added to the benchmark suite as MLPerf continues Read more…

Q&A with Nvidia’s Chief of DGX Systems on the DGX-GB200 Rack-scale System

March 27, 2024

Pictures of Nvidia's new flagship mega-server, the DGX GB200, on the GTC show floor got favorable reactions on social media for the sheer amount of computing power it brings to artificial intelligence.  Nvidia's DGX Read more…

Call for Participation in Workshop on Potential NSF CISE Quantum Initiative

March 26, 2024

Editor’s Note: Next month there will be a workshop to discuss what a quantum initiative led by NSF’s Computer, Information Science and Engineering (CISE) directorate could entail. The details are posted below in a Ca Read more…

Waseda U. Researchers Reports New Quantum Algorithm for Speeding Optimization

March 25, 2024

Optimization problems cover a wide range of applications and are often cited as good candidates for quantum computing. However, the execution time for constrained combinatorial optimization applications on quantum device Read more…

NVLink: Faster Interconnects and Switches to Help Relieve Data Bottlenecks

March 25, 2024

Nvidia’s new Blackwell architecture may have stolen the show this week at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California. But an emerging bottleneck at the network layer threatens to make bigger and brawnier pro Read more…

Who is David Blackwell?

March 22, 2024

During GTC24, co-founder and president of NVIDIA Jensen Huang unveiled the Blackwell GPU. This GPU itself is heavily optimized for AI work, boasting 192GB of HBM3E memory as well as the the ability to train 1 trillion pa Read more…

MLPerf Inference 4.0 Results Showcase GenAI; Nvidia Still Dominates

March 28, 2024

There were no startling surprises in the latest MLPerf Inference benchmark (4.0) results released yesterday. Two new workloads — Llama 2 and Stable Diffusion Read more…

Q&A with Nvidia’s Chief of DGX Systems on the DGX-GB200 Rack-scale System

March 27, 2024

Pictures of Nvidia's new flagship mega-server, the DGX GB200, on the GTC show floor got favorable reactions on social media for the sheer amount of computing po Read more…

NVLink: Faster Interconnects and Switches to Help Relieve Data Bottlenecks

March 25, 2024

Nvidia’s new Blackwell architecture may have stolen the show this week at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California. But an emerging bottleneck at Read more…

Who is David Blackwell?

March 22, 2024

During GTC24, co-founder and president of NVIDIA Jensen Huang unveiled the Blackwell GPU. This GPU itself is heavily optimized for AI work, boasting 192GB of HB Read more…

Nvidia Looks to Accelerate GenAI Adoption with NIM

March 19, 2024

Today at the GPU Technology Conference, Nvidia launched a new offering aimed at helping customers quickly deploy their generative AI applications in a secure, s Read more…

The Generative AI Future Is Now, Nvidia’s Huang Says

March 19, 2024

We are in the early days of a transformative shift in how business gets done thanks to the advent of generative AI, according to Nvidia CEO and cofounder Jensen Read more…

Nvidia’s New Blackwell GPU Can Train AI Models with Trillions of Parameters

March 18, 2024

Nvidia's latest and fastest GPU, codenamed Blackwell, is here and will underpin the company's AI plans this year. The chip offers performance improvements from Read more…

Nvidia Showcases Quantum Cloud, Expanding Quantum Portfolio at GTC24

March 18, 2024

Nvidia’s barrage of quantum news at GTC24 this week includes new products, signature collaborations, and a new Nvidia Quantum Cloud for quantum developers. Wh Read more…

Alibaba Shuts Down its Quantum Computing Effort

November 30, 2023

In case you missed it, China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba has shut down its quantum computing research effort. It’s not entirely clear what drove the change. Read more…

Nvidia H100: Are 550,000 GPUs Enough for This Year?

August 17, 2023

The GPU Squeeze continues to place a premium on Nvidia H100 GPUs. In a recent Financial Times article, Nvidia reports that it expects to ship 550,000 of its lat Read more…

Shutterstock 1285747942

AMD’s Horsepower-packed MI300X GPU Beats Nvidia’s Upcoming H200

December 7, 2023

AMD and Nvidia are locked in an AI performance battle – much like the gaming GPU performance clash the companies have waged for decades. AMD has claimed it Read more…

DoD Takes a Long View of Quantum Computing

December 19, 2023

Given the large sums tied to expensive weapon systems – think $100-million-plus per F-35 fighter – it’s easy to forget the U.S. Department of Defense is a Read more…

Synopsys Eats Ansys: Does HPC Get Indigestion?

February 8, 2024

Recently, it was announced that Synopsys is buying HPC tool developer Ansys. Started in Pittsburgh, Pa., in 1970 as Swanson Analysis Systems, Inc. (SASI) by John Swanson (and eventually renamed), Ansys serves the CAE (Computer Aided Engineering)/multiphysics engineering simulation market. Read more…

Choosing the Right GPU for LLM Inference and Training

December 11, 2023

Accelerating the training and inference processes of deep learning models is crucial for unleashing their true potential and NVIDIA GPUs have emerged as a game- Read more…

Intel’s Server and PC Chip Development Will Blur After 2025

January 15, 2024

Intel's dealing with much more than chip rivals breathing down its neck; it is simultaneously integrating a bevy of new technologies such as chiplets, artificia Read more…

Baidu Exits Quantum, Closely Following Alibaba’s Earlier Move

January 5, 2024

Reuters reported this week that Baidu, China’s giant e-commerce and services provider, is exiting the quantum computing development arena. Reuters reported � Read more…

Leading Solution Providers

Contributors

Comparing NVIDIA A100 and NVIDIA L40S: Which GPU is Ideal for AI and Graphics-Intensive Workloads?

October 30, 2023

With long lead times for the NVIDIA H100 and A100 GPUs, many organizations are looking at the new NVIDIA L40S GPU, which it’s a new GPU optimized for AI and g Read more…

Shutterstock 1179408610

Google Addresses the Mysteries of Its Hypercomputer 

December 28, 2023

When Google launched its Hypercomputer earlier this month (December 2023), the first reaction was, "Say what?" It turns out that the Hypercomputer is Google's t Read more…

AMD MI3000A

How AMD May Get Across the CUDA Moat

October 5, 2023

When discussing GenAI, the term "GPU" almost always enters the conversation and the topic often moves toward performance and access. Interestingly, the word "GPU" is assumed to mean "Nvidia" products. (As an aside, the popular Nvidia hardware used in GenAI are not technically... Read more…

Shutterstock 1606064203

Meta’s Zuckerberg Puts Its AI Future in the Hands of 600,000 GPUs

January 25, 2024

In under two minutes, Meta's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, laid out the company's AI plans, which included a plan to build an artificial intelligence system with the eq Read more…

Google Introduces ‘Hypercomputer’ to Its AI Infrastructure

December 11, 2023

Google ran out of monikers to describe its new AI system released on December 7. Supercomputer perhaps wasn't an apt description, so it settled on Hypercomputer Read more…

China Is All In on a RISC-V Future

January 8, 2024

The state of RISC-V in China was discussed in a recent report released by the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. The report, entitled "E Read more…

Intel Won’t Have a Xeon Max Chip with New Emerald Rapids CPU

December 14, 2023

As expected, Intel officially announced its 5th generation Xeon server chips codenamed Emerald Rapids at an event in New York City, where the focus was really o Read more…

IBM Quantum Summit: Two New QPUs, Upgraded Qiskit, 10-year Roadmap and More

December 4, 2023

IBM kicks off its annual Quantum Summit today and will announce a broad range of advances including its much-anticipated 1121-qubit Condor QPU, a smaller 133-qu Read more…

  • arrow
  • Click Here for More Headlines
  • arrow
HPCwire