INCITE ignites combustion simulation

(page 2 of 3)

Chen and her fellow researchers are casting new light on the issue with a massive computer simulation of a turbulent, non-premixed jet flame with detailed chemistry.  Their work could lead to more efficient, cleaner engines in cars, jets and other vehicles and devices.  The Department of Energy’s Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program made the simulation possible with a grant of 2.5 million computer processor hours.  It was the largest such grant announced in 2005, and the simulation ran on some of the world’s most powerful computers:

• The IBM SP3 RS/6000, named Seaborg, at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California
• The IBM p575 POWER 5, named Bassi, at NERSC
• The Cray X1E and CrayXT3 at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.

The simulation called for that kind of power because of its incredibly high resolution.  It calculated reactions at each of up to half a billion points in the simulated flame at 120,000 time increments.  It tracked 11 different kinds of molecules and 21 different reactions.  The simulation generated about 30 terabytes of data – enough to fill the 100-gigabyte hard drives on 300 desktop computers.

That kind of detail would have been impossible without INCITE’s massive allocation of high-performance computer time.  With less processor time and less-powerful computers, the simulation would have taken decades to run.  Instead, it took just a few weeks.

« Previous       1   |   2   |   3   |   Print       Next »