Michigan State University has been awarded 1.3 million node hours of computation time on the world’s fastest supercomputer by the Department of Energy to study galaxies at an unprecedented level.
According to a March 16 MSU Today report, the Frontier supercomputer has 9,400 computing nodes and is capable of making 2 quintillion calculations per second. The grant is part of a program called INCITE, or “Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment,” which was created in 2003.
“The DOE has always supported computation, but they’ve also really supported open science and they’re doing that with the best supercomputers we have,” grant leader Brian O’Shea said in the report.
The focus is to award researchers access to supercomputers to solve computational intensive problems, the report said. The new grant will allow a research team at MSU to study galaxies at an unprecedented rate. The team will be studying relationships between large galaxies, plasma and supermassive black holes that are in the center of a galaxy.
O’Shea is a professor at the Department of Physics and Astronomy, as well as the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams and the Department of Computational Mathematics, Science and Engineering, the report said. He explained the DOE wants researchers to “push the boundaries computationally.”
“We’ll be studying galaxies and the physics of plasmas around galaxies, but we’ll also be pushing this new computer in ways it hasn’t been pushed before,” O’Shea said in the report. “The things we learn, the code we develop, these are tools that the community can adopt.”
Gina Tourassi, director of the National Center for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, said it is “an exceptionally important year” for the Frontier’s lab, according to the MSU Today report.
“Users now have access to a machine nearly 10 times as powerful as our previous flagship system, opening up avenues throughout the whole of science that were until now completely inaccessible,” Tourassi said in the report.
Philipp Grete is a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Hamburg and said this is something they have prepared for for many years, MSU Today said. He said the most challenging part will be unknown issues that start to show up when someone pushes the limits of the simulation.
“Based on past experience, it’ll just be a matter of time until something breaks, but we are prepared for this,” Grete said in the report.
O’Shea added that, when it comes to galaxy simulations, the supercomputers are powerful enough and the code is good enough they now need to keep in mind how to go about the physics of galaxies compared to before. He said this directly relates with fusion energy, which is why the DOE is supporting it, according to the report.
“That atmosphere, though, is also the thing that’s feeding the black hole which is making these jets,” Michigan State University Professor Brian O’Shea said, according to MSU Today.
Deovrat Prasad, a postdoctoral fellow at Cardiff University, said an unsolved puzzle is the “formation and Evolution of galaxies,” the report said. He noted the simulations will be the “highest resolutions with length scales spanning six orders of magnitude, exploring length scales from a few parsecs to several megaparsecs.”
Forrest Glines, a Metropolis Postdoctoral Fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory, added the simulations are the largest scale models of galaxies he knows of, MSU Today reported.
“The sheer volume of data that will be produced by these simulations will provide its own challenge once the simulations are finished,” Glines said, according to MSU. “We will have to develop new analysis pipelines to explore the simulations with data at that scale.”
The research team expressed their excitement to get going on the project no matter what challenges they will face, MSU Today reported.
“Together, we form a complete group with the needed expertise for the project,” Prasad said in the report.
