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Argonne Leadership Computing Facility Research

Cracking the source of crackle in supersonic jet noise

The ASCR Leadership Computing Challenge projects that make up roughly 30% of the time awarded on ALCF supercomputers each year go to support “high-risk, high-payoff” simulations of interest to the DOE. Stanford’s Parviz Moin used his 60 million hour award to make a new and potentially industry-changing discovery about the source of supersonic jet noise. No ear protection needed.
Moin and his team ran large eddy simulations on Intrepid to determine the source of crackle in hot supersonic jet engines. Crackle is a major source of engine noise that causes hearing damage and impacts fuel efficiency. This particularly irritating phenomenon is associated with shock-like “N-shaped” acoustic waveforms consisting of sudden strong compressions followed by more gradual expansions. Because crackle occurs in the direction of peak jet noise, its elimination has the potential to help meet the U.S. Navy’s near-term jet noise reduction goal of 3 dB in the peak noise.
One way to make jets less noisy is to modify the shapes of the engine exhaust nozzles using pointed cutouts, called chevrons. Past ALCF allocations to Moin enabled a comprehensive study of the physical mechanisms by which chevrons affect the jet mixing and shock-associated noise. His current allocation was used to complete the simulations capturing crackle events and to develop new methods to identify and save such events for further study. Furthermore, with the source of the crackle noise now identified, new nozzle designs can be simulated.

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Argonne Leadership Computing Facility Technology

Renewed urgency in the race to exascale

At a special two-day symposium last month, Argonne invited back many of the visionaries who in some way contributed to the lab’s 30 years in advancing parallel computing and computational science. Most if not all of these individuals have made a career in high performance computing — directing programs and conducting research in government agencies, national laboratories, universities and industry. Strong DOE investment in research and development of HPC capabilities has kept the U.S. the leader in high impact scientific research for decades, but now the DOE’s shining scientific supercomputing centers are oversubscribed by factors of three or more. Exascale is the next and necessary milestone in the race for computing power that will enable future breakthroughs in energy, medicine, and engineering, and the U.S. is now facing fierce competition from around the world.
Argonne’s Rick Stevens has been a leader in DOE planning for exascale since 2007. He recently testified to the urgent need for sustained government investment in exascale at a Congressional Subcommittee on Energy hearing, “America’s Next Generation Supercomputer: The Exascale Challenge.” The May 22 hearing was related to a bill proposed by Illinois Rep. Randy Hultgren to improve the HPC research program of the DOE and make a renewed push for exascale research in the U.S. A full transcript of his testimony can be found here.

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Education Musings

Critical thinking skills: what designers have and U.S. industry needs

From the time I was an undergraduate physics major, I’ve also been interested in the creative activities intrinsic to art and design fields. Critique, conceptualization, and iteration are all useful practices for developing new ways of seeing reality. Good artists and designers understand the value of deconstructing a subject, evaluating its components, and using that information to guide future directions. These “critical thinking” skills are increasingly in demand in all sectors.
The STEM-to-STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math + Art = STEAM) movement being championed by RISD’s John Maeda aims to enhance U.S. economic competitiveness by cultivating the creative and critical thinking skills that innovative companies are seeking. National Laboratories are also leaders in innovation, but there is a notable absence of artistic and design collaboration in the R&D process.
This effort could lead to very exciting transformations in U.S. industry and research. One question I’ve been considering lately is how to incorporate STEM-to-STEAM beyond the K-12 setting to the scientific workplace.

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Research

Mira science run probes turbulence physics

Earlier this month, University of Texas’s Robert Moser initiated the first full-scale production run on Mira, the ALCF’s new 10-petaflops system. Moser is examining the complex physics of a specific region of wall-bounded turbulence, which is central to understanding the energy losses inherent in transportation. Moser’s work addresses energy loss at many scales, from vehicles moving through air or water, to fluids transported through the pipes and ducts that comprise urban infrastructure. The team developed their code specifically to exploit Mira’s capabilities, and this recently-launched investigation aims to develop a nearly complete understanding of the phenomena dominating this type of turbulence. One week into his campaign and 47 million core-hours later, the team is closer to reaching that goal. The remaining jobs of Moser’s campaign executed in the coming days, over 100 million core-hours in total, should yield even better insights.

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Argonne Leadership Computing Facility

March 14 Argonne OutLoud Public Lecture

Research teams from around the world are preparing to use Mira, Argonne’s new petaflops supercomputer, to tackle the most challenging problems in science and engineering today. What happens when a star explodes? Can we find alternative fuel sources? How hot will the greenhouse world be? These problems cannot be addressed any other way because of their sheer size or complexity. Mira will be used to compress time and explore many possible solutions to issues related to energy and the environment. It will enable the prototyping and testing of construction materials before they are ever physically built and will help search for effective vaccines to deadly infections.
On March 14, Argonne’s Pete Beckman will give a talk about how math and supercomputers are accelerating scientific discovery as part of Argonne’s public lecture series Argonne OutLoud. Dr. Beckman is the co-director of the Northwestern-Argonne Institute for Science and Engineering.

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Argonne Leadership Computing Facility Technology

Mira: ALCF's next-generation supercomputer


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.
[Photo Gallery]

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Argonne Leadership Computing Facility

ALCF's Early Science Program – science from day one


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!

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Argonne Leadership Computing Facility Research

Blood clots are ready for their close-up

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]

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Argonne Leadership Computing Facility

Record allocation for ALCF – 2.83B core-hours


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.