Big Blue Gene Week: Successful and Promising
As announced recently, the BlueGene/Q supercomputer JUQUEEN at JSC was dedicated exclusively to large-scale massively parallel computations during the week from 14 to 20 June. The response was tremendous, with users taking the opportunity to execute some of their scientifically and computationally most demanding simulations in full parallelism on up to 458,752 compute cores.
More than 77% of the available time was used for true full machine runs, and in total 22 users were able to complete 84 jobs, which amounts to about 70 million core-h. The availability of the system during the week was higher than 93%, thus demonstrating its remarkable reliability. The event served various scientific use cases in topics such as turbulent fluid dynamics, neuroscience, elementary particle physics, molecular dynamics, and complex stencil code development. Among the specific problems addressed were modelling the propagation of polarized light through brain tissue by means of a massively parallel three-dimensional Maxwell solver to enhance the understanding of the structural organization of the human brain, and simulating the mixing of species in a turbulent decaying flow as it occurs in various practical situations.
Due to the positive response, JSC is considering repeating this type of event and encourages all users who have suitable codes and applications to join in and report on their experiences. All users interested in further information are invited to contact JSC via sc@fz-juelich.de.
(Contact: Dr. Daniel Rohe)
JSC News, No. 243, July 2016