Denver, Colorado, November 22, 2013 – Scientists from Switzerland, Germany and the U.S have set a new supercomputing simulation record in fluid dynamics by reaching 14.4 Petaflops of sustained performance to win the 2013 ACM Gordon Bell Prize awards.acm.org/bell.
The simulation, which represents a 150- fold improvement over current state-of-the-art performance levels for this type of application, has potential utility for improving the design of high pressure fuel injectors and propellers, shattering kidney stones, and therapeutic approaches for cancer treatment. The research was conducted by scientists at ETH Zurich and IBM Research, in collaboration with the Technical University of Munich and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). The results were presented by the team at SC13 sc13.supercomputing.org in Denver, where the recipient of the ACM Gordon Bell Prize was announced on November 21. The simulation conducted by the team resolved unique phenomena associated with clouds of collapsing bubbles. This condition occurs when vapor bubbles formed in a liquid collapse due to changes in pressure. The successful effort employed 13 trillion cells and 6.4 million threads on LLNL’s “Sequoia” IBM BlueGene/Q, one of the fastest supercomputers in the world. The simulation resolved 15,000 bubbles and a 20-fold reduction in time to solution over previous research. The paper describing this achievement was one of six papers chosen as finalists for the 2013 Gordon Bell Prize awarded by ACM acm.org.
Members of the team included Diego Rossinelli, Babak Hejazialhosseini, Panagiotis Hadjidoukas, and Petros Koumoutsakos from ETH Zurich; Costas Bekas and Alessandro Curioni from IBM Zurich Research Laboratory; Adam Bertsch and Scott Futral from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; and Steffen Schmidt and Nikolaus Adams from Technical University Munich.
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