We will be looking at the Aurora supercomputer next week. After many delays Intel has finished the hardware installation.
From MIT's Technology Review, September 21:
Scientists have begun running experiments on Frontier, the world’s first official exascale machine, while facilities worldwide build other machines to join the ranks.
MIT Technology Review’s What’s Next series looks across industries, trends, and technologies to give you a first look at the future. You can read the rest of our series here.It can be difficult to wrap your brain around the number-crunching capability of the world’s fastest supercomputer. But computer scientist Jack Dongarra, of the University of Tennessee, puts it this way: “If everybody on Earth were to do one calculation per second, it would take four years to equal what that computer can do in one second.”
The supercomputer in question is called Frontier. It takes up the space of two tennis courts at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the eastern Tennessee hills, where it was unveiled in May 2022.
Here are some more specs: Frontier uses approximately 50,000 processors, compared with the most powerful laptop's 16 or 24. It consumes 20 million watts, compared with a laptop’s 65 or so. It cost $600 million to build.
When Frontier came online, it marked the dawn of so-called exascale computing, with machines that can execute an exaflop—or a quintillion (1018) floating point operations a second. Since then, scientists have geared up to make more of these blazingly fast computers: several exascale machines are due to come online in the US and Europe in 2024.
But speed itself isn’t the endgame. Researchers are building exascale computers to explore previously inaccessible science and engineering questions in biology, climate, astronomy, and other fields. In the next few years, scientists will use Frontier to run the most complicated computer simulations humans have ever devised. They hope to pursue yet unanswered questions about nature and to design new technologies in areas from transportation to medicine.
Evan Schneider of the University of Pittsburgh, for example, is using Frontier to run simulations of how our galaxy has evolved over time. In particular, she’s interested in the flow of gas in and out of the Milky Way. A galaxy breathes, in a way: gas flows into it, coalescing via gravity into stars, but gas also flows out—for example, when stars explode and release matter. Schneider studies the mechanisms by which galaxies exhale. “We can compare the simulations to the real observed universe, and that gives us a sense of whether we’re getting the physics right,” Schneider says.
Schneider is using Frontier to build a computer model of the Milky Way with high enough resolution to zoom in on individual exploding stars. That means the model must capture large-scale properties of our galaxy at 100,000 light-years, as well as properties of the supernovas at about 10 light-years across. “That really hasn’t been done,” she says. To get a sense of what that resolution means, it would be analogous to creating a physically accurate model of a can of beer along with the individual yeast cells within it, and the interactions at each scale in between.
Stephan Priebe, a senior engineer at GE, is using Frontier to simulate the aerodynamics of the next generation of airplane designs. To increase fuel efficiency, GE is investigating an engine design known as an “open fan architecture.” Jet engines use fans to generate thrust, and larger fans mean higher efficiency. To make fans even larger, engineers have proposed removing the outer structural frame, known as the nacelle, so that the blades are exposed as in a pinwheel. “The simulations allow us to obtain a detailed view of the aerodynamic performance early in the design phase,” says Priebe. They give engineers insight into how to shape the fan blades for better aerodynamics, for example, or to make them quieter.
Frontier will particularly benefit Priebe’s studies of turbulence, the chaotic motion of a disturbed fluid—in this case, air—around the fan. Turbulence is a common phenomenon. We see it in the crashing of ocean waves and in the curl of smoke rising from an extinguished candle. But scientists still struggle to predict how exactly a turbulent fluid will flow. That is because it moves in response to both macroscopic influences, such as pressure and temperature changes, and microscopic influences, such as the rubbing of individual molecules of nitrogen in the air against one another. The interplay of forces on multiple scales complicates the motion.
“In graduate school, [a professor] once told me, ‘Bronson, if anybody tells you that they understand turbulence, you should put one hand on your wallet and back out of the room, because they’re trying to sell you something,’” says astrophysicist Bronson Messer, the director of science at Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, which houses Frontier. “Nobody understands turbulence. It really is the last great classical physics problem.” ....
....MUCH MORE
Also at Technology Review:
Say, hey, have I mentioned turbulence?
Why yes indeedy (technical term), most recently September 18:
Geoengineering: "Reflecting sunlight to cool the planet will cause other global changes"
Be careful with this stuff. Dealing with complex - chaotic systems is right at, or a little beyond, the edge of human comprehension. Before you go recommending any geoengineering more intensive than maybe dumping a ton of iron dust in the Southern Ocean, prove how much you understand the interactions:
September 11, 2021 Think You're Smart Don'tcha: Figure This Out And Make A Million Bucks
In last week's post "Fluid Dynamics (and the filth on your phone)" I made the assertion "This is one of those fields of study that are so mind-bogglingly complex that....", without supplying any supporting statements or facts.(in these situations the reader can assume I am relying on the Charlie Munger all-purpose turnaround: "Think about it a little more and you will agree with me because you're smart and I'm right.")But for folks who require a bit of backup, here is Ars Technica, followed by the Clay Mathematics Institute, along with a cameo by Feynmann for added "Appeal to Authority":Turbulence, the oldest unsolved problem in physics...
And reprised June 13, they had me at "penguins":
Figure This Out And Make A Million Bucks: Now With Penguins
First up, the penguins, from Chalkdust, (A Magazine For The Mathematically Curious)....
And The Trouble With Turbulence:
There is a lot more money involved than just the million dollars from the Millennium Prize for understanding fluid dynamics and turbulence. In the climate arena the coupled climate models are still not all that skillful when trying to comprehend the interactions of the sea and the atmosphere, a huge and extraordinarily complex part of the whole picture and not that well understood.
On a much smaller scale, understanding turbulence can be worth hundreds of millions to billions of dollars when siting turbines on a wind farm.....
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