Professor Sigal Gottlieb and Professor Gaurav Khanna awarded opportunity to Oak Ridge National Lab's Summit supercomputer
Oak Ridge National Lab's Summit supercomputer is the fastest in America and Professor Sigal Gottlieb (Mathematics) and Professor Gaurav Khanna (Physics) are getting a chance to test its power.
The system, built by IBM, can perform 200 quadrillion calculations in one second. Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, the Summit supercomputer consists of 9,216 POWER9 processors, 27,648 Nvidia Tesla graphics processing units, and consumes 13 MW of power.
Gottlieb and Khanna, alongside their colleague Zachary Grant of Oak Ridge National Lab, were awarded 880,000 core-hours of supercomputing time on Summit. They received the maximum awarded Directors' Discretionary allocation which is equivalent to $132,200 of funding according to the Department of Energy. Their research project titled "Mixed-Precision WENO Method for Hyperbolic PDE Solutions" involves implementing and evaluating different computational methods for black hole simulations.
Their proposal for supercomputing time was successful, in part, due to excellent preliminary results that were generated using UMass Dartmouth's own C.A.R.N.i.E supercomputer, and MIT's Satori supercomputer that Khanna had access to via UMass Dartmouth's membership in the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Consortium (MGHPCC). The Satori supercomputer is similar in design to Summit, but almost two orders-of-magnitude smaller in size.
Gottlieb and Khanna are the Co-Directors for UMass Dartmouth's Center for Scientific Computing & Visualization Research and Grant was a former student of Gottlieb's in the Engineering & Applied Sciences Ph.D. program.