LIVERMORE’S SEQUOIA SUPERCOMPUTER HITS COMPUTATIONAL MILESTONE

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Sequoia supercomputer has enabled researchers at the lab to perform record-setting simulations that utilize all 1,572,864 of the supercomputer’s computational cores, which lab officials say could have major implications for research on energy, science and the weapons program. Sequoia was recently ranked as the second fastest supercomputer in the world, operating at 16.3 petaflops, but it is the first machine to exceed one million computational cores.

 

Researchers at the lab used Sequoia to study how extremely powerful lasers interact with dense plasmas in the production of fusion energy, using the machine for the largest particle-in-cell code simulations by number of cores ever performed. Computers like Sequoia allow the codes to simulate the interaction of tends of billions to trillions of individual particles in a very complex system, the lab said. Using a code named OSIRIS for simulations on “fast ignition,” Livermore researcher Frederico Fiuza demonstrated excellent scaling in parallel performance of OSIRIS to Sequoia’s full 1.6 million cores. Fiuza said simulations that previously took a year to perform on 4,000 cores could be performed in a day on Sequoia. “This historic calculation is an impressive demonstration of the power of high-performance computing to advance our scientific understanding of complex systems,” said Bill Goldstein, LLNL’s deputy director for Science and Technology. “With simulations like this, we can help transform the outlook for laboratory fusion as a tool for science, energy and stewardship of the nuclear stockpile.”