2005 APS March Meeting
Monday–Friday, March 21–25, 2005;
Los Angeles, CA
Session J6: Extreme Computing
11:15 AM–1:39 PM,
Tuesday, March 22, 2005
LACC
Room: 502A
Sponsoring
Unit:
DCOMP
Chair: Thomas Schulthess, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Abstract ID: BAPS.2005.MAR.J6.1
Abstract: J6.00001 : Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing in Plasma Science
11:15 AM–11:51 AM
Preview Abstract
Abstract
Author:
William Tang
(Princeton University)
Advanced computing is generally recognized to be an increasingly
vital tool
for accelerating progress in scientific research during the 21st
Century.
For example, the Department of Energy's ``Scientific Discovery
through
Advanced Computing'' (SciDAC) Program was motivated in large
measure by the
fact that formidable scientific challenges in its research
portfolio could
best be addressed by utilizing the combination of the rapid
advances in
super-computing technology together with the emergence of
effective new
algorithms and computational methodologies. The imperative is to
translate
such progress into corresponding increases in the performance of the
scientific codes used to model complex physical systems such as
those
encountered in high temperature plasma research. If properly
validated
against experimental measurements and analytic benchmarks, these
codes can
provide reliable predictive capability for the behavior of a
broad range of
complex natural and engineered systems. This talk reviews recent
progress
and future directions for advanced simulations with some
illustrative
examples taken from the plasma science applications area.
Significant recent
progress has been made in both particle and fluid simulations of
fine-scale
turbulence and large-scale dynamics, giving increasingly good
agreement
between experimental observations and computational modeling.
This was made
possible by the combination of access to powerful new computational
resources together with innovative advances in analytic and
computational
methods for developing reduced descriptions of physics phenomena
spanning a
huge range in time and space scales. In particular, the plasma
science
community has made excellent progress in developing advanced
codes for which
computer run-time and problem size scale well with the number of
processors
on massively parallel machines (MPP's). A good example is the
effective
usage of the full power of multi-teraflop (multi-trillion
floating point
computations per second) MPP's to produce three-dimensional, general
geometry, nonlinear particle simulations which have accelerated
progress in
understanding the nature of plasma turbulence in
magnetically-confined high
temperature plasmas. These calculations, which typically utilized
billions
of particles for thousands of time-steps, would not have been
possible
without access to powerful present generation MPP computers and the
associated diagnostic and visualization capabilities. In general,
results
from advanced simulations provide great encouragement for being
able to
include increasingly realistic dynamics to enable deeper physics
insights
into plasmas in both natural and laboratory environments. The
associated
scientific excitement should serve to stimulate improved
cross-cutting
collaborations with other fields and also to help attract bright
young
talent to the computational science area.
To cite this abstract, use the following reference: http://meetings.aps.org/link/BAPS.2005.MAR.J6.1