CUG Best Paper Describes Trillion-Particle Simulation on Hopper

The Cray User Group wrapped up in Napa Valley earlier this month with a team from NERSC winning best paper: Trillion Particles, 120,000 cores, and 350 TBs: Lessons Learned From a Hero I/O Run on Hopper.

An unprecedented trillion-particle simulation, which utilized more than 120,000 processors and generated approximately 350 terabytes of data, pushed the performace capability of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center’s (NERSC’s) Cray XE6 “Hopper” supercomputer to its limits. In addition to shedding new light on a long-standing astrophysics mystery, the successful run also allowed a team of computational researchers from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and Cray Inc. to glean valuable insights that will help thousands of scientists worldwide make the most of current petascale systems like Hopper, which are capable of computing quadrillions of calculations per second, and future exascale supercomputers, which will compute quintillions of calculations per second.

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