The world’s fastest academic supercomputer is now up and running. Kraken, a Cray XT5 system located at the National Institute for Computational Sciences (NICS), managed by the University of Tennessee (UT) and funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), promises to push the limits of simulation science.
NICS, in conjunction with the DOE-supported NCCS, sponsored a workshop April 13-16, which covered important issues for obtaining increased performance on the new Cray XT5 systems installed by both programs. These powerful supercomputer systems have features which must be well understood by developers and users to enable large applications to scale to higher number of processors and achieve sustained higher performance.
For details about the Workshop:
2008 Cray Workshop Home Page.
NICS has taken delivery of a new Cray XT5. The new machine, which replaces the Cray XT4, will be called by the same name, 'Kraken'. The new Kraken XT5 will be available starting Monday February 2. Over the next two months, until March 30, both machines will be available to facilitate the transition from the XT4 to the XT5.
Chains of amino acids called peptides move, jump, twist, and change shape, all of which add to the myriad difficulties involved in peptide research. Yet understanding them is instrumental in putting them to good use—for example, in the treatment of diabetes. To better understand one such peptide’s properties and strengthen its effectiveness in combating this disease, a team led by Adrian Roitberg of the University of Florida has used approximately 500,000 hours on Kraken at NICS.
Kraken’s ability to simulate phenomena beyond the bounds of observation promises to significantly improve our understanding in multiple scientific arenas. For example, despite our knowledge of the human body, some of the most elementary biological processes remain a mystery, at least for now.
One area in which Kraken’s presence will surely be felt is climate change. With the consensus that carbon dioxide is altering the Earth’s climate, the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has asked climate modelers to perform a new type of short-term climate simulation.
A team led by P.K. Yeung of Georgia Tech is investigating fundamental problems of dispersion in turbulent fluid flow, which plays a crucial role in pollutant transport in both atmospheric and oceanic environments. These numerical simulations allow researchers to track the motions of large numbers of infinitesimally small particles in fluids and closely examine their movement away from one another under the influence of differing lengths and timescales.
Core-collapse supernovas, stars whose iron cores exceed the Chandrasekhar mass and implode under their own weight, litter the universe with most of the elements in the periodic table—all of the gold in California is the result of their demise.
