Gravitational Wave Physics Simulations on the AFRL CONDOR Supercomputer

AFRL CONDOR 超级计算机上的引力波物理模拟

• 批准号: 1135664
• 负责人: Gaurav Khanna
• 金额: $ 4.88万
• 依托单位: University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2011
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2011-09-01 至 2013-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1135664&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Gravitational; Wave; Physics; Simulations; AFRL

This award supports a research program to understand and to address the challenges associated to scaling specific gravitational wave physics applications from a prototype cluster of 16 Sony PlayStation 3 (PS3) gaming consoles to the largest system now available, that built by the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) in Rome, NY. This system, named AFRL CONDOR, makes use of 1,716 PS3s alongside traditional servers and Nvidia CUDA GPUs to achieve 500 TFLOPS of computing power. The PI has unrestricted access to this large system through a recently established CRADA agreement with AFRL. One of the specific gravitational wave physics applications that will be targeted in this work is one that models the process of the capture of a small (say, solar-mass) black hole by a supermassive black hole, an important problem in the area of theoretical gravitational wave physics, and a potential source of gravitational waves for space-based detectors.There is considerable current interest in harnessing the power of video gaming technology for scientific high-performance computing. The PI's prototype cluster was used successfully for scientific computation and demonstrated order-of-magnitude gains in metrics such as performance-per-dollar and performance-per-Watt as compared with traditional CPU-based clusters. Successful scaling up of the applications used for this project will immediately impact the gravitational wave science that these applications enable. In addition, the lessons learned and the experience gained associated to achieving good scaling on a large system like AFRL CONDOR will be extremely valuable and likely applicable to other problems and systems. Parallelism or optimization approaches that may be developed through this project may also find applicability in other problems and areas. The outcomes and results will be published in research journals and conferences and also made openly available though the PI's research website. In addition, this is a project that would be very attractive to both physics and engineering students. The supported graduate student will learn about various aspects of supercomputing, including how to approach and address challenges related to scaling on large supercomputers like AFRL CONDOR.

该奖项支持一项研究计划，以了解和解决与从16个Sony PlayStation 3（PS3）游戏机组成的原型集群到现在可用的最大系统，该系统由空军研究实验室（AFRL）在纽约州罗马建立的最大系统。该系统名为AFRL Condor，使用传统服务器和NVIDIA CUDA GPU并使用1,716 ps3，以实现500 Tflops的计算能力。 PI通过与AFRL的最近建立的Crada协议无限制地访问了该大型系统。这项工作中将针对的特定重力波物理学应用之一是通过超级质量黑洞捕获一个小（例如太阳能）黑洞的过程，这是理论引力波物理学领域的一个重要问题，并且对空间基础检测的潜在引力浪潮的潜在引力来源是对当前的兴趣进行计算的兴趣。与传统的基于CPU的群集相比，PI的原型集群成功地用于科学计算，并证明了诸如每美元绩效和每瓦绩效的指标，例如每瓦的性能和性能。成功扩展该项目的应用程序将立即影响这些应用程序启用的重力波科学。此外，在像AFRL Condor这样的大型系统上实现良好缩放的经验教训和获得的经验将非常有价值，并且可能适用于其他问题和系统。可以通过该项目开发的并行性或优化方法也可能在其他问题和领域中找到适用性。结果和结果将在研究期刊和会议上发布，并通过PI的研究网站公开提供。此外，这是一个对物理和工程专业学生都非常有吸引力的项目。受支持的研究生将了解超级计算的各个方面，包括如何处理和应对与大型超级计算机（如AFRL Condor）相关的挑战。