CSMD Researcher Comments in Wired Science
In a recent edition of Wired magazine's ezine Wired Science, Bronson Messer, a senior researcher in the Computational Astrophysics group, discusses the benefits of using the latest supercomputers on his simulations of core-collapse supernovae.
“People have been trying to attack this on computers for 40 to 50 years,” Messer said. “We’re using simulations to basically pick a neutrino and ride along as it flies out of the star, and do this with as many neutrinos as possible. We’re finally starting to see some hints of what’s happening, and we’re pretty jazzed about it.”
The team has used Jaguar to simulate the supernova up to about 100 milliseconds after the shock wave begins, and they hope to reach half a second. “If we can use 180,000 processors, we’ll get much more accurate physics,” Messer said.
The full article can be seen HERE.
ORNL team's nanoscale theory and simulation underpin collaborator's discoveries
 Nanoscale theory and computational simulations by a pair of ORNL scientists have contributed to discoveries recently published in leading scientific journals.
Vincent Meunier and Bobby Sumpter, both of the Computer Science & Mathematics Division and Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences, are co-authors on two papers that represent important advances in carbon-based materials research.
The researchers’ theory-based computational simulations have enabled collaborators at several institutions to understand why their experimental materials exhibit useful properties.
The full article can be seen HERE.
Infiniband Exceeds High-Speed TCP/IP
Researchers at the Energy Department's Oak Ridge National Laboratory have shown that InfiniBand can be used to transport large datasets via a dedicated network thousands of miles in length with a throughput unmatched by high-speed TCP/IP connections.
CSMD researcher Nageswara Rao presented a paper on the group's work, "Wide-Area Performance Profiling of 10GigE and InfiniBand Technologies," at the SC08 conference in November.
Rao said difficulties abound with large data transfers over high-speed wide-area networks, including packet conversion from storage networks and the complex task of TCP/IP tuning. "The task of sustaining end-to-end throughput…over thousands of miles still remains complex," the researchers wrote in the paper.
The full article at Government Computing News can be seen HERE.
The HPCwire summary can be seen HERE.
Erickson Serves as Committee Member for National Academy of Science Investigation
David Erickson, a Senior Scientist in ORNL's Computational Earth Sciences group, served as a committee member on the National Academy of Sciences' recent study to develop a better understanding of the potential scientific and technological impact of high-end capability computing (HECC) in fields of science and engineering of interest to the Federal government.
The fields chosen for the study were the atmospheric sciences, astrophysics, chemical separations, and evolutionary biology. The committee found continuing demands from the four fields for more, and more powerful, high-end computing. All four areas rely on HECC to carry out simulations of systems that are too complex to analyze through observation, experiment, or theory. Three of the four areas (the exception being chemical separations) are dealing with very large amounts of data and need HECC to handle them.
The report from this study "The Potential Impact of High-End Computing on Illustrative Fields of Science and Engineering," can be seen HERE.
Tony Mezzacappa Named Editor-in-Chief - Computational Science & Discovery
 Non-profit scientific publisher Institute of Physics Publishing (IOP), UK, has announced the launch of a new journal - Computational Science & Discovery. The journal will focus on scientific advances and discovery through computational science in physics, chemistry, biology and applied science. Tony Mezzacappa of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory serves as the Editor-in-Chief of the journal.
Computational Science & Discovery will publish original, peer-reviewed research across physics, chemistry, biology and applied science. The journal offers an opportunity for researchers to publish all the important components of their enterprise, together with their scientific results.
The first issue is currently available online at http://www.iop.org/EJ/toc/1749-4699/1/1.
Jaguar simulation wins Gordon Bell Prize
A team led by the Computer Science & Mathematics Division's Thomas Schulthess received the prestigious 2008 Association for Computing Machinery Gordon Bell Prize Thursday after attaining the fastest performance ever in a scientific supercomputing application.
Thomas is group leader of ORNL's Computational Materials Science Group and recently accepted a position as director of the Swiss National Supercomputing Center at Manno, an institution of ETH Zurich. He and colleagues Thomas Maier, Michael Summers and Gonzalo Alvarez, all of ORNL, achieved 1.352 quadrillion calculations a second—or 1.352 petaflop - on ORNL's Cray XT Jaguar supercomputer with a simulation of superconductors, or materials that conduct electricity without resistance. By modifying the algorithms and software design of its DCA++ code to maximize speed without sacrificing accuracy, the team was able to boost performance tenfold with the help of John Levesque and Jeff Larkin of Cray Inc.
The team's simulation made efficient use of 150,000 of Jaguar's 180,000-plus processing cores to explore electrical conductance.
To put the achievement into perspective, it would take every man, woman and child on earth more than 500 years to work through as many calculations as DCA++ gets through in a single day - and that's assuming each of us worked day and night solving one calculation a second. More details.
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