INCITE collaboration boosts combustion simulation
Posted April 16, 2007
It took weeks for high-performance computers to run a turbulent combustion simulation Sandia National Laboratory-California researchers created – but it could have been even longer.
The simulation was made possible with a grant of 2.5 million processor hours from the Department of Energy’s Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program. See the feature article.
David Skinner of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center at DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory collaborated with researchers at Sandia, also a DOE facility, to scale their code so it ran on thousands of processors. Similarly, Mark Fahey, a computational scientist at DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), helped Chen’s group port its code, called S3D, to the lab’s Cray X1E computer.
Because the computer scientists fine-tuned S3D, it ran twice as fast as before on Seaborg, NERSC’s IBM SP3 computer, and more than 10 times faster on the Cray computer. S3D ran with 90 percent parallel efficiency on 5,000 processors on the Cray XT3 at ORNL and 80 percent parallel efficiency on 512 CrayX1E processors.
