Communications of the ACM
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Lawrence Livermore Scientists Set a New Simulation Speed Record on the Sequoia Supercomputer
In addition to achieving the fastest-ever simulation speed (504 billion events per second), the Sequoia Blue Gene/Q supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory also set a record for the most highly parallel discrete event simulation.
Credit: IBM
Computer scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have reached a simulation speed of 504 billion events per second on LLNL's Sequoia Blue Gene/Q supercomputer. The mark dwarfs the previous top speed of 12.2 billion events per second set in 2009.
The researchers also set a record for the most highly parallel discrete event simulation, with 7.86 million simultaneous tasks using 1.97 million cores.
IBM built the 120-rack Sequoia supercomputer, which has a peak performance of 25 petaflops per second and is the second-fastest supercomputer in the world.
The speed breakthrough makes the direct simulation of planetary scale models a possibility. "This is an exciting time to be working in high performance computing, as we explore the petascale and move aggressively toward exascale computing," says Computational Center for Nanotechnology Innovations director Chris Carothers. "We are reaching an interesting transition point where our simulation capability is limited more by our ability to develop, maintain, and validate models of complex systems than by our ability to execute them in a timely manner."
From Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
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