Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing
The U.S. Department of Energy's Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) program brings together the nation's top researchers to tackle challenging scientific problems.
The Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research in DOE's Office of Science supports multidisciplinary SciDAC projects aimed at developing future energy sources, studying global climate change, accelerating research in designing new materials,improving environmental cleanup methods, and understanding physics from the tiniest particles to massive supernovae explosions.
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SciDAC Team Develops Petascale-Ready Version of CCSM’s Atmospheric Model
Cubed-sphere spectral element grid |
The SciDAC project “Modeling the Earth System” is focused on creating a first-generation Earth system model based on the Community Climate System Model (CCSM). As these improvements will require petascale computing resources, the project is also working to ensure that CCSM is ready to fully utilize DOE’s upcoming petascale platforms. The main bottleneck to petascale performance in Earth system models is the scalability of the atmospheric dynamical core. Team members at Sandia, ORNL and NCAR have thus been focusing on the integration and evaluation of new, more scalable, dynamical cores (based on cubed-sphere grids) into the atmospheric component of the CCSM. The first model successfully integrated uses a new formulation of the spectral element method that locally conserves both mass and energy and has positive preserving advection.
This dynamical core allows the CCSM atmospheric component to use true two-dimensional domain decomposition for the first time, leading to unprecedented scalability demonstrated on LLNL’s BG/L system. The model scales well out to 96,000 processors with an average grid spacing of 25 km. Even better scalability will be possible when computing with a global resolution of 10 km, DOE’s long term goal (DOE ScaLeS Report, 2004). As part of the project’s model verification work, a record-setting one-year simulation was just completed on 64,000 processors of BG/L. This initial simulation was obtained using prescribed surface temperatures and without the CCSM land and ice models. Coupling with the other CCSM component models is the team’s current focus.
discovery highlights archive
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Juan Meza:
"How Math
Will Help
Save
the World"
On April 19, Juan Meza, head of LBNL’s High Performance Computing Research Department, was the invited speaker at the Sonoma State University Northern California Undergraduate Mathematics Conference, where he addressed the topic “The Role of Mathematics in Amplifying Science Research: How Mathematics Will Help Save the World.” The slides from his presentation are online at youtube.
Dr. Meza is the LBNL point of contact for SciDAC, Base Math, and Computer Science projects. He is lead PI for a joint BES/ASCR project developing scaleable methods for studying the
electronic excitation and optical responses of nanostructures. This research has resulted in new optimization techniques for electronic structure calculations, physics-based preconditioners
for accelerating convergence of self-consistent calculations, and development of a new linear
scaling 3D fragment electronic structure calculation that scales up to 2000 processors.
scientist highlights archive |
The Open Science Grid(OSG) Consortium: Collaborative Science over the Grid
The Open Science Grid (OSG) is one of several SciDAC-2 projects that are at the forefront of the continuing United States investments in Grids. OSG itself is leading in the provision of a community based, high-throughput nationally distributed infrastructure for a broad sweep of scientific research. Today OSG provides access to computational resources at more than sixty sites across the US – including NERSC, Brookhaven National Laboratory and Fermilab, more than six campus-wide university infrastructures, and many large and small university sites across the country.
OSG relies on today's state of the art networks for science, and advanced experimental research networks to support high throughput data distribution and computing for the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, existing DOE Office of Science physics experiments, bioinformatics, chemistry, climate research, computer science and other domains. The infrastructure today is accepting more than thirty percent of the data and providing more than twenty-five percent of the analysis throughput for the LHC.
Through the Virtual Data Toolkit, OSG supplies an integrated suite of software technologies used on the Grid based on the core Condor and Globus technologies created by the “fathers” of the Grid at Universities in the US, and augmented by tools and utilities from many places including Europe.
OSG is supported by the Department of Energy’s Office of Science SciDAC-2 program from the High Energy Physics, Nuclear Physics and Advanced Software and Computing Research programs; and the National Science Foundation Math and Physical Sciences, Office of Cyber-Infrastructure and Office of International Science and Engineering Directorates.
Contact Ruth Pordes (ruth@fnal.gov) or Miron Livny(miron@cs.wisc.edu) for more details.
URL: www.opensciencegrid.org
See also "Grids, Clouds, and the Internet"
news and notes archive
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