 |
|
DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
|
Applications:
WORLD'S BIGGEST COMPUTER GRID
POURS WATER ON TROUBLED OILS
In a unique experiment, five of the world's fastest supercomputers,
including
Daresbury Laboratory-based HPCx, have been linked together into a seamless
"Grid" for the first time. This computational feat was matched by the
unprecedented scale of the interactive calculation then carried out on this
Grid, involving thousands of visualizations of around 10 million times the
amount of data used to play a typical home computer game. Once analyzed, the
data could help solve industrial problems and revolutionise the design of
consumer products containing complex oil-and-water mixtures, from preventing
crystallization in oil pipelines and improving drug delivery to better shampoo
and salad cream.
Scientists two continents apart plugged simultaneously into the combined
processing power of HPCx and CSAR in the United Kingdom and the United States'
TeraGrid machines - loosely equivalent to 30,000 typical PCs - to run
massive 3-D simulations of some of the most ubiquitous and
complex fluids on Earth. These adopt liquid-crystal like shapes called gyroids
and their behavior is near-impossible to predict by conventional fluid theory
and simulation.
"It's a world-leading simulation, made possible by cutting-edge Grid
technology, and never before attempted on such a scale," commented Dr. Richard
Blake, associate director of the Computational Science and Engineering
Department at CCLRC Daresbury Laboratory, who coordinated the United Kingdom's
computational contribution to last month's TeraGyroid Project experiment.
This was the first demonstration of the ambitious project, led by Peter
Coveney, professor of Physical Chemistry at University College London as part
of a wider U.K. project, RealityGrid. The aim is to open up an entirely new
field of science by exploiting the potential of interactive, high-performance
computing. TeraGyroid Project scientists -- the name comes from the terabytes
(1,000,000,000,000 bytes) and Teraflops of data involved in the computation --
want to predict the real-life behavior of complex oil-and-water type mixtures
because these are relevant to so many industrial, consumer and biochemical
applications.
The new Grid technology not only allows vast amounts of data to be handled,
but also speeds up its manipulation by allowing scientists to "steer" a
calculation as it is happening. As the simulation evolves, the models it
produces are continuously converted to animated graphics that can be viewed on
a laptop (and before long, also on a handheld PDA) anywhere on the Grid -
each snapshot in time representing up to a billion numbers converted to
pictures. Researchers can collaborate with colleagues anywhere on the Grid,
throw out improbable scenarios, "joystick" their way through the visual
display and return models to the supercomputers for the next stage in the
simulation. "Access to these supercomputing resources allows us to study the
behaviour of complex interacting fluids on length and time scales which are
totally unprecedented, in an area of utmost relevance to everyday life," said
Coveney.
The TeraGyroid team scooped the High Performance Computing Challenge Award
Nov. 20 at the Supercomputing 2003 conference in Phoenix for their innovative
demonstration.
The TeraGyroid Project was jointly funded by the United Kingdom's
Engineering
and Physical Sciences Research Council and the National Science
Foundation.
|