AUSTIN, Texas, Nov.
20, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- Scientists at the University of Texas at Austin, IBM Research (NYSE:
IBM), New York University and the
California Institute of Technology have
been awarded the 2015 Gordon Bell Prize for realistically
simulating the forces inside the Earth that drive plate tectonics.
The team's work could herald a major step toward better
understanding of earthquakes and volcanic activity.
The accomplishment was made using advanced algorithms running on
the "Sequoia" IBM BlueGene/Q located at the Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory, one of the fastest supercomputers in the
world.
The award-winning research team developed innovative algorithms
for a mathematical approach called an "implicit solver" to
realistically simulate Earth features at unprecedented resolution
and accuracy. The team was able to predict the motions of the
Earth's plates and the forces acting on them while also simulating
the flow of mantle. Remarkably, the simulation involved more
than 600 billion nonlinear equations, a major milestone in
computational science and engineering
The simulations were performed on Sequoia, which consists of 96
IBM BlueGene/Q racks, reaching a theoretical peak performance of
20.1 petaflops. Each rack consists of 1,024 computer nodes, hosting
16 core POWER processor chips designed for Big Data computations
that are running at 1.6 GHz.
The team's code reached an unprecedented 97 percent parallel
efficiency in scaling the solver to 1.6 million cores, a new world
record. This milestone was achieved by rethinking the end-to-end
computational framework, from the mathematical model to the
numerical algorithms to the massively parallel implementation. The
team devised a numerical algorithm that could tackle the vast range
of scales present in Earth's mantle while also mapping efficiently
to the massively parallel architecture of the BlueGene/Q
supercomputer.
"These advances will open the door to addressing such
fundamental questions as what are the main drivers of plate motion
and what are the key processes governing the occurrence of great
earthquakes," said Prof. Michael
Gurnis, Director of the Seismological Laboratory at the
California Institute of Technology.
"While the conventional view was that efficiently solving highly
nonlinear equations on millions of cores would be intractable, we
demonstrated that with careful redesign of discretization,
algorithms, solvers and implementation, it would be possible," said
Prof. Georg Stadler of New York University's Courant Institute of
Mathematical Sciences.
"This work has application to a much broader class of models in
science and engineering involving complex multiscale behavior,"
said Omar Ghattas, Director of the
Center for Computational Geosciences at the Institute for
Computational Engineering and Sciences and Professor of Geological
Sciences and of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin.
Despite being an underlying cause for devastating earthquakes,
volcanoes and tsunamis, many of the fundamental principles behind
the flow of the mantle remain a mystery to scientists. In fact,
understanding this "mantle convection" has been designated as one
of the "10 Grand Research Questions in Earth Sciences" by
the U.S. National Academies.
"We are only beginning to demonstrate how the combination of
advanced algorithms, supercomputing and Big Data drawn from sensors
and the Internet of Things can realistically simulate the most
extreme nonlinear, heterogeneous forces of nature," said Costas
Bekas, manager of Foundations of Cognitive Solutions, IBM Research
- Zurich. "We are exploring new
ways to apply the availability of tremendous amounts of field
sensor data and cognitive computing to a topic and then enable
practitioners to reduce the time to solution from years to weeks
and even days for everything from inventing a new material to
discovering an untapped source of energy."
Authors of the paper detailing the work include:
- Johann Rudi - The University of Texas at Austin
- A. Cristiano I. Malossi - IBM
Corporation
- Tobin Isaac - The University of Texas at Austin
- Georg Stadler – New York University
- Michael Gurnis - California Institute of Technology
- Peter W. J. Staar - IBM
Corporation
- Yves Ineichen - IBM
Corporation
- Costas Bekas - IBM Corporation
- Alessandro Curioni - IBM
Corporation
- Omar Ghattas - The University of Texas at Austin
IBM scientists have now been awarded the Gordon Bell Prize six
times, most recently in 2013.
The team's research was reported in the SC15 paper "An
Extreme-Scale Implicit Solver for Complex PDEs: Highly
Heterogeneous Flow in Earth's Mantle." The paper is available from
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=2807591.2807675.
Note to journalists and bloggers: You can view a video of the
award winning simulation here and download photos here.
About the Gordon Bell Prize
The Gordon Bell Prize
recognizes the extraordinary progress made each year in the
innovative application of parallel computing to challenges in
science, engineering, and large-scale data analytics. Prizes may be
awarded for peak performance or special achievements in scalability
and time-to-solution on important science and engineering problems.
Financial support of the $10,000
prize is made possible by Gordon
Bell, a pioneer in high-performance and parallel
computing.
About IBM Research
Now in its 70th year, IBM Research
continues to define the future of information technology with more
than 3,000 researchers in 12 labs located across six continents.
Scientists from IBM Research have produced six Nobel Laureates, 10
U.S. National Medals of Technology, five U.S. National Medals of
Science, six Turing Awards, six Gordon Bell Prizes, 19 inductees in
the National Academy of Sciences and 20 inductees into the U.S.
National Inventors Hall of Fame –the most of any company. For more
information, please visit www.research.ibm.com.
Contact:
Chris Sciacca
IBM Media Relations
cia@zurich.ibm.com
+41 44 72 48 443
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SOURCE IBM