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Supercomputing More Light Than Heat


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 Defect-induced conical intersections allow one to connect material structure to the propensity for nonradiative decay, a source of heat loss in solar cells and LED lights.

Michigan State University researchers used the eXtreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment to gain access to more than 975,000 compute hours on the Maverick supercomputing system at the Texas Advanced Computing Center.

Credit: Ben Levine

Researchers at Michigan State University (MSU) have used the eXtreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) to gain access to more than 975,000 compute hours on the Maverick supercomputing system at the Texas Advanced Computing Center.

The researchers used this computing power to study silicon nanocrystals, and they wanted to use graphics-processing units because they excel at computing linear algebra calculations, which are involved in the calculations that characterize the behavior of electronics in a material.

"Using the graphics-processing units, we've been able to accelerate our calculations by hundreds of times, which has allowed us to go from the molecular scale, where we were limited before, up to the nano-material size," says MSU professor Benjamin Levine.

Now that the researchers have demonstrated the ability to predict conical intersections associated with heat loss from semiconductors and semiconductor nanomaterials, they say the next step is to complete the design in the computer.

From Texas Advanced Computing Center
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