Argonne and HPCMP win OASCRs for outstanding data visualization

The  Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) conference was held in San Diego two weeks ago, and we have some news coming out of that. Argonne National Lab received two awards — they’re called OASCR Awards, which looks amusingly like “Oscar”, and the awards are statues reminiscent of the little gold man — for visualizations produced on their supers.

ANL visualizationThe Argonne winning visualizations were “Turbulent Flow of Coolant in an Advanced Nuclear Reactor” and “Simulation of the Gravitationally Confined Detonation (GCD) Model of a Type Ia Supernovae for Ignition at Multiple Points” (pictured at right).

Both the visualizations and the computer runs for the winning entries were done at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF). The computations were carried out on one of the world’s fastest and most energy-efficient supercomputers: Intrepid, Argonne’s IBM Blue Gene/P. The visualizations were performed on Eureka with software developed at Argonne. Eureka is also located at the ALCF and is one of the world’s largest graphics processing units, providing more than 111 teraflops and over 3.2 terabytes of RAM.

Ten total awards were given. The Data Analysis and Assessment Center (DAAC) of the DoD HPCMP also won two of the awards for visualizations of the free surface flow around simulated hull designs and the behavior of Kevlar impacted by a fragment. You can see examples of images from both projects, and many others, in the DAAC’s image gallery.

Congratulations all the way around.