Mira will provide billions more processor-hours per year to the scientists, engineers, and researchers who use it to run complex simulations of everything from nuclear reactors to blood vessels through allocations awarded through INCITE, ALCC and Director’s Discretionary programs.
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Over the next two months, ALCF’s Early Science Program projects are expected to use approximately 2 billion core-hours on Mira! These select sixteen projects are based on state-of-the-art petascale parallel applications and span a wide range of scientific fields, numerical methods, programming models, and computational approaches. The project teams have been working with ALCF staff, postdoctoral domain specialists, and IBM technicians for several months to prepare their codes to take advantage of Mira’s massive architecture. The preliminary runs are already yielding astounding results. Stay tuned!
Leopold Grinberg of Brown University and an international team of researchers have used three of the world’s fastest supercomputers to create a detailed and sophisticated model of clot formation in an aneurism — a bulging of a vessel wall as it fills with blood. Grinberg’s team used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data taken from a patient with an aneurism to create a realistic model of the major arteries in the patient’s neck and brain and more than 300,000 computer processors to simulate a rupture of the aneurism, blood flow through the system, and formation of a clot.
Creating accurate, real-time computer simulations of how blood clots work—and the role they play in medical emergencies—could, in the future, dramatically improve the way that doctors predict the risk of damaging clots and treat the damage incurred by strokes and heart attacks. [Slideshow]
The DOE’s Leadership Computing Facilities at Argonne and Oak Ridge national laboratories have awarded a combined 4.7 billion supercomputing core hours to 61 science and engineering projects through its 2013 Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment program. The ALCF awarded 2.83 billion hours on Mira and Intrepid, both IBM Blue Gene systems. When INCITE made its first awards in 2004, three projects received an aggregate 5 million hours on DOE supercomputers. The collective 2013 allocation represents an almost 1,000-fold growth in resources provided to researchers. To date, INCITE has delivered more than 10 billion computing hours to the scientific community.