PRACE-ISC Award Goes to SuperMUC Users for Sustained Petascale Science

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ISC_Logo_txt_MitteThe Gauss Supercomputing Center in Germany reports that users of the SuperMUC at LRZ have once again been awarded the PRACE-ISC Award. The award was presented to a team of scientists at ISC’14 for their seismic science project “SeisSol,” which achieved a sustained system performance of 1.09 Petaflops for a three hour run.

Code Modernization Wins the Day

Supported by the experts of the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ), computer scientists, mathematicians, and geophysicists of the Technische Universität München (TUM) and the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU) collectively optimised and completely parallelised the 70,000 lines of code of SeisSol, a software to simulate earth quakes, to optimally leverage the parallel architecture of SuperMUC. The collaborative effort under leadership of Prof. Dr. Michael Bader (TUM) and Dr. Christian Pelties of the Department of Geo and Environmental Sciences at LMU resulted in achieving a SeisSol application performance of 1.42 Petaflops for a weak scaling test which corresponds to 44.5% of SuperMUC’s peak processing performance. For the entire simulation run, which took about 3 hours of computing time on the LRZ supercomputer, a sustained system performance of 1.09 Petaflops was achieved.

We cannot stress enough to point out how collaborative efforts of scientists of various fields can lead to substantial success”, notes Professor Arndt Bode, Director of the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre. “The sustained Petaflops performance obtained in this earthquake simulation could only be achieved through the optimal cooperation of specialists from Geophysics, Computer Science, and from the Supercomputing Centre as put into practise at LRZ’s Extreme Scaling workshops and through LRZ’s partnership initiatives,“ affirms Professor Bode.

The basis of the optimization of this simulation run was laid at an Extreme Scaling Workshop held earlier at LRZ, where programmers of the most advanced applications running on SuperMUC together with LRZ’s staff jointly worked on optimizing and further parallelizing the codes. At a second Extreme Scaling Workshop, twelve invited international participants worked for an entire week at LRZ to get their 8 application programs efficiently utilizing all 147,456 compute cores of SuperMUC in parallel. The result: Six of the eight application codes were able to start on the whole computer and run without any problems.

In this video from ISC’14, Alex Heinecke from Intel and Sebastian Rettenberger from the Technical University of Munich describe their award-winning paper on volcano simulation.

Learn more about the PRACE Awards * See more videos from ISC’14