This is a story idea from the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory. To arrange for an interview with a researcher, please contact the Communications and External Relations staff member identified at the end of the tip.
SUPERCOMPUTING — Ramping up realism . . .
A special report (see link below) shows speedups of 1.5- to 3-fold for most scientific application codes running on extreme-scale hybrid supercomputers using code accelerators largely developed for the video game industry. The addition of graphics processing units to today’s fastest central processing units promises significant increases in supercomputing capacity. Scientists, engineers and computing experts presented the findings recently in Washington, D.C., at the Accelerating Computational Science Symposium 2012, which the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility co-hosted with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre, Cray Inc. and NVIDIA. Code acceleration promises increased realism of simulations and decreased time to results in such hybrid supercomputers as Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Titan, in which GPUs will be installed by year’s end to deliver 20 petaflops of peak performance. Advances now possible with hybrid supercomputers include deeper understanding of phenomena from earthquakes to supernovas and faster innovations of materials and devices. The report is available at http://www.olcf.ornl.gov/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/ACSS_Final_v3.pdf.
