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DOE Pulse
  • Number 403  |
  • December 16, 2013

'Bubbles' simulation on Sequoia wins Gordon Bell Prize

Lawrence Livermore scientists and collaborators set a new record in supercomputing in fluid dynamics by resolving unique phenomena associated with clouds of collapsing bubbles. Image courtesy of Petros Koumoutsakos zVg/CSE Laboratory, ETH Zurich

Lawrence Livermore scientists and collaborators set a
new record in supercomputing in fluid dynamics by
resolving unique phenomena associated with clouds of
collapsing bubbles.
Image courtesy of Petros Koumoutsakos
zVg/CSE Laboratory, ETH Zurich

Scientists at ETH Zurich and IBM Research, in collaboration with the Technical University of Munich and DOE's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, have set a new record in supercomputing in Fluid Dynamics using 6.4 million threads on LLNL's 96 rack Sequoia IBM BlueGene/Q, one of the fastest supercomputers in the world.

The record for a high performance computing calculation, set on Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's Sequoia supercomputer, was awarded the Gordon Bell Prize for peak performance at SC13 in Denver, Colo.

Lawrence Livermore computer scientists Adam Bertsch, Blue Gene Systems lead, and Scott Futral, group leader for the HPC development environment, also were members of the winning team. Livermore Computing enabled the achievement of this simulation on Sequoia.

The prize was awarded for an 11 petaflops (11 quadrillion floating operations per second) simulation of cloud cavitation collapse.

The scientists performed the largest simulation ever in fluid dynamics by employing 13 trillion cells and reaching an unprecedented, for flow simulations, 14.4 Petaflop sustained performance on Sequoia - 73 percent of the supercomputer's theoretical peak. The simulations resolved unique phenomena associated with clouds of collapsing bubbles which have applications ranging from treating kidney stones and cancer to improving the efficiency of high pressure fuel injectors.

The Gordon Bell Prize is awarded annually by the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) at the Supercomputing conference.

For additional information, see the IBM announcement.

[Anne Stark, 925.422.9799,
stark8@llnl.gov]