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SKACH scientists win time on top European supercomputer
from Contact 15
BY TANYA PETERSEN (SKA SWITZERLAND)
Scientists working with the SKA Switzerland consortium (SKACH) have been awarded the largest ever allocation – 5.5m node hours, corresponding to 22m Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) hours – on the LUMI supercomputer in Finland to conduct a simulation looking at the role of turbulence and gravity in the universe.
The simulation is helping to drive the development of codes, enhanced by high-performance computing and machine learning techniques, to handle large data streams, such as those expected from the SKA telescopes.
The researchers have developed a leading-edge hydrodynamics code called SPH-EXA that is capable of simulating the behaviour of fluids and plasmas on supercomputers, and this simulation will investigate the formation of protostellar cores, the progenitors of stars like our own Sun.
“Understanding this will help us to know the distribution of masses of stars which has important implications for the observable properties of galaxies. This is equivalent to the largest turbulence simulation that has ever been done but for the first time we are including self-gravity, which is what we need for the stellar cores to collapse. It’s a major challenge because doing the calculations with gravity requires a lot of computational power,” explained Dr Rubén Cabezón, co-principal investigator based at the University of Basel.
Another important element of the project is testing the code itself, to assess any bottlenecks or inefficiencies in the way the simulation uses the system. This work is imperative to large scale simulations that are being developed within the SKACH community, in preparation for future complex processing of SKA telescope data.
Developed for the EuroHPC Extreme Scale Allocation Call, the LUMI-G allocation was awarded for the project: “TGSF: The Role of Turbulence and Gravity in Star Formation, Unveiling the sonic scale with Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics”.
