DCU researcher, Dr Turlough Downes, wins 4.3 million hours on Europe's most advanced supercomputers
24 August 2009

Dr Turlough Downes

Dr Turlough Downes has been awarded 4.3 million core hours of supercomputing time on Europe's most advanced supercomputers. The award was made by PRACE (the EU-funded Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe) following a Europe-wide competition which resulted in a total of 4.4 million core hours being awarded. This makes Dr Downes' allocation more than 95% of the total resources available under the competition. The award is an international stamp of approval from Europe's premier supercomputing centres.

The success will allow Dr Downes and his team to optimise their codes for simulating star forming regions on the most advanced systems in the world. This will involve training of Irish researchers in the use of these kinds of cutting edge computer systems, something essential for Ireland's growing knowledge economy.

The code to be used in this project, HYDRA, written by Dr Turlough Downes and Dr Stephen O'Sullivan (Dublin City University) is an astrophysical fluid code which incorporates the effects of magnetic fields and, most interestingly, multifluid effects. In astrophysics many fluids, such as molecular clouds, are only partially ionised. It is widely accepted within the astrophysics community that multi fluid simulations will be essential to the continuing development of our understanding of many important phenomena such as turbulence and dynamo action. Until recently it has been difficult to perform such simulations on massively parallel architectures due to a lack of efficiently parallel algorithms with appropriate stability properties. Novel algorithms to overcome these issues were developed and implemented in a production code, HYDRA, by the Dr Downes and his collaborators. This code has been shown to scale well to tens of thousands of cores on a BlueGene/P system. Part of the project will involve using the full might of the JUGENE system in Juelich, Germany which contains 292,144 cores and is the most powerful computer system in Europe and the third most powerful in the world.

About PRACE: The Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe prepares the creation of a persistent pan-European HPC service, consisting of several tier-0 centres providing European researchers with access to capability computers and forming the top level of the European HPC ecosystem. PRACE is a project funded in part by the EU's 7th Framework Programme.

Other info: The competition resulted in 3 projects being awarded time, 2 of which are from Irish-based researchers. The third project is from a France-based institution.