Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility

A team at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility recently addressed a performance bottleneck in one portion of an OLCF user’s application. Because of its efforts, the user’s team saw a sixfold performance improvement in the code.

In April 2014, a team used its INCITE allocation to simulate galaxy formation over billions of years using one trillion particles in a simulation called ds14_a (ds stands for Dark Sky).

A multi-institution team has been using Titan to create the largest fully-coupled simulation of the universe’s Epoch of Reionization.

Using Titan, researchers at Stony Brook University completed a three-dimensional, high-resolution investigation of the thermonuclear burning a double-detonation white dwarf undergoes before explosion.

For 5 years a team led by William Daughton of Los Alamos National Laboratory has been simulating magnetic reconnection in space using the Cray XK7 Titan supercomputer and its predecessor, the Cray XT5 Jaguar supercomputer. The team’s simulations support the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s (ORNL’s) Bronson Messer shared his knowledge on this subject during the 2014 International Summer School on AstroComputing (ISSAC), held at the University of California’s High-Performance AstroComputing Center (UC-HiPACC) in San Diego, from July 21 to August 1.

Of particular importance to Bhattacharjee’s team is reconnection and shocks in systems where the plasma particles do not collide very often, both of which can serve as mechanisms for cosmic ray acceleration.

The OLCF’s Jack Wells was an invited speaker at the American Astronomical Society’s (AAS’s) Exascale Radio Astronomy conference from March 30 to April 4 in Monterrey, CA, where he detailed recent advances in computational astrophysics on Department of Energy supercomputing systems such as Titan.

Now, more than a decade later, researchers mapping radiation signatures from the Cassiopeia A supernova with NASA’s NuSTAR high-energy x-ray telescope array have published observational evidence that supports the SASI model.

Researchers are using DOE’s most powerful computing systems, including the nation’s top-ranked machine, ORNL’s Titan, to simulate the evolution of the universe as it expands across billions of years.