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news release:Cray XT3 System
Performs Record Simulation Related to Superconducting ITER Project
Seattle, WA, Sept. 20: Using a powerful new Cray XT3™
supercomputer, the Department of Energy's (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL)
has run the world's fastest, most-detailed simulation of waves used to control
plasma -- gaseous matter superheated enough to generate massive amounts of
energy. The simulation is related to the multibillion-dollar ITER project, which
aims to tame plasma so it can later become a virtually inexhaustible supply of
electricity.
ORNL's new Cray supercomputer also posted leading
results on the HPC Challenge standard tests of supercomputer performance, Cray
Inc. (NASDAQ:
CRAY) reported today.
En Route To Reproducing the Sun's Energy
"Fusion researchers are acutely aware of Earth's
dwindling supplies of petroleum and other non-renewable energy sources. They
have been trying for decades to tame fusion, the process that powers the sun.
Energy from fusion is released when hydrogen ions are heated to tens of millions
of degrees," said Don Batchelor, head of the Plasma Theory Group in ORNL's
Fusion Energy Division. "A major advantage of plasma energy, aside from its
near-limitlessness, is that it does not contribute to global climate change."
But harnessing plasma energy depends on
scientists' ability to understand and control the behavior of the plasma. ORNL's
record-setting simulation of plasma control waves promises to move this
understanding an important step forward. ORNL performed the simulation under the
DOE's SciDAC (Scientific Discovery Through Advanced Computing) program.
"Using 3,072 processors, or about 60 percent of
the new Cray XT3 supercomputer at ORNL's National Center for Computational
Science, we were able to run the largest, most-detailed simulation ever done of
plasma control waves in a tokamak, the donut-shaped reactor that will eventually
form the core of the multinational ITER reactor," said Fred Jaeger, the ORNL
researcher who ran the simulation. "We were able to complete the simulations
three to seven times faster than when we run the same AORSA (All-Orders Spectral
Algorithm) application on DOE's 'Seaborg' high-performance computing system."
The U.S. has joined forces with a number of
nations in Europe and Asia to develop ITER, the multibillion-dollar
International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, by 2016. ITER is the
experimental step between today's studies of plasma physics and tomorrow's
electricity-producing fusion power plants. ITER's donut-shaped reactor will use
magnetic fields to contain a roiling maelstrom of plasma that will serve as the
'fuel' for a massively energetic fusion reaction. ITER will operate at 100
million degrees Centigrade and generate 500 megawatts of fusion power.
Record Results on HPC Challenge Benchmark
ORNL's new Cray XT3 supercomputer has also posted
leading results on the industry-standard HPC Challenge benchmark tests sponsored
by the National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Energy and DARPA HPCS
(High Productivity Computing Systems) program. The HPC Challenge benchmark suite
"is a better indicator [than any single test] of how an HPC system will perform
across a spectrum of real-world applications," according to Jack Dongarra, who
assembled the test suite with colleagues from the University of Tennessee and
elsewhere.
The HPC Challenge test suite is designed to
provide an overview of the major strengths and weaknesses of various HPC
systems. To ensure that system purchasers and others see the whole picture, the
HPC Challenge website requires results to be posted for all of the tests.
Computer-makers typically are reluctant to post a mix of good and poor results.
The most recent HPC Challenge results from ORNL,
run on 5,200 processors of the lab's Cray XT3 supercomputer, set a new record
for the largest system to post results for the tests, surpassing a
3,744-processor version of the same Cray system at ORNL. This is important
because the larger the system, the harder it is to achieve outstanding results
on every test.
The Cray XT3 system posted superior performance
on four of the five global tests in the HPC Challenge suite: high-performance
Linpack (G-HPL), global bandwidth (G-STREAMS), G-PTRANS and G-FFTE. On these
important tests, which measure performance across the entire system, the Cray
XT3 supercomputer's absolute performance was 4 to 13.6 times faster than the
next-fastest listed U.S.-made system.
"These outstanding large-scale results show that
the Cray XT3 supercomputer is keeping its promise to deliver highly scalable
application performance," said Peter Ungaro, president and chief executive
officer of Cray. "The Cray XT3 system, with its balanced massively parallel
processing architecture, was designed specifically to meet our customers' needs
for superior performance when running large, complex applications across
hundreds or thousands of processors. We are excited to be working with ORNL to
break new ground in science and computing."
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