Matteo Bugli wins Leibniz Scaling Award
The Leibniz-Rechenzentrum (LRZ) provides supercomputing facilities for a wide range of scientific applications. Access to the high-performance computer SuperMUC with more than 19000 processors, a total of 155,656 cores, a peak performance of about 3 petaFLOPS, main memory of 340 terabytes and 15 petabytes of hard disk space is highly sought after. Making maximum use of the supercomputer through efficient coding is therefore a high priority for the LRZ.
Volume rendering of the gas rest mass density for a simulated accretion disk around the black hole. As the simulations are performed in three dimensions and with complex physical processes, such as magnetic fields and global dynamical instabilities, the significant amount of computing power they require can be provided only by large super-computing facilities.
The Extreme Scaling Workshops organised by the LRZ aim to address this challenge. Researchers are granted 1 Million CPU hours and collaborate with experts from the IT industry and LRZ staff to scale the software up to the complete 140,000 cores of SuperMUC Phase1. The focus of the 2017 workshop was on emergent supercomputing applications from the fields of climate research, turbulence simulation and CFD, as well as astrophysics, plasma physics and geophysics.
Matteo Bugli from MPA participated with his ECHO code for three-dimensional simulations of relativistic magnetized accretion disks orbiting around black holes. In particular, during his PhD Matteo studied the development of global non-axisymmetric instabilities and the role of magnetic fields in the dynamical evolution of the disk. Over the past two years the code’s parallel efficiency was already vastly improved. During the workshop, Matteo and his team achieved the best relative improvement, an eight times increase in scalability on SuperMUC, and won the Leibniz Scaling Award.