GE and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) received the HPC Wire Readers’ Choice Award for Best Use of HPC Application in the Energy Industry at SC16. Pictured, from left to right, are: ORNL’s Industrial Partnerships Program Director for Computing and Computational Sciences Suzy Tichenor; Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility Project Director Buddy Bland; ORNL’s Associate Laboratory Director for Computing and Computational Sciences Jeff Nichols; Project Principal Investigator Jin Yan of GE Global Research; Rick Arthur of GE Global Research; ORNL’s National Center for Computational Sciences Director Jim Hack; and Tabor Communications CEO Tom Tabor.
The Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) and General Electric (GE), an industry user of the OLCF’s 27-petaflop Titan supercomputer, have been recognized in the annual HPCwire Readers’ Choice Awards for Best Use of HPC Application in the Energy Industry. The award was presented November 15 at the 2016 International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC16), in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Using Titan, GE researchers produced the first simulation of combustion, or the reactive mixing of air and fuel, across multiple combustors in a prototype GE gas turbine. GE worked closely with Cascade Technologies to scale up Cascade’s CHARLES code for Titan’s architecture, achieving a 30-times speedup in code performance. The team’s unrivaled simulations included particle diffusion, chemical reactions, heat transfer, and energy exchange in microsecond snapshots over as many as a billion grid cells to confidently predict combustion behavior during turbine operation. The team predicts design improvements based on the simulations, coupled with other aspects of the new turbine design, may increase efficiency by a full percent, which could save $11 billion in fuel over 20 years for an entire US fleet.
“A year ago these were gleam-in-the-eye calculations,” said Joe Citeno, combustion engineering manager for GE Power. “We wouldn’t do them because we couldn’t do them in a reasonable time frame to affect product design. Titan collapsed that, compressing our learning cycle by a factor of 10-plus and giving us answers in a month that would have taken a year with our own resources.”
GE received an allocation of time to work on Titan through the OLCF’s Accelerating Competitiveness through Computational Excellence industrial partnerships program. The OLCF is a US Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
The annual HPCwire Readers’ Choice Awards are determined through a nomination and voting process within the global HPCwire community.
“From thought leaders to end users, the HPCwire readership reaches and engages every corner of the high-performance computing community,” said Tom Tabor, CEO of Tabor Communications, publisher of HPCwire. “Receiving their recognition signifies community support across the entire HPC space as well as the breadth of industries it serves. We are proud to recognize these efforts and make the voices of our readers heard, and our congratulations go out to all the winners.”
Award winners were revealed at the HPCwire booth at SC16. More information on these awards can be found at the HPCwire website.
Oak Ridge National Laboratory is supported by the US Department of Energy’s Office of Science. The single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, the Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit science.energy.gov.
