Abstract
For many years, the drive towards computational physics studies that match the size and time-scales of experiment has been fueled by increases in processor and interconnect performance that could be exploited with relatively little modification to existing codes. Engineering and electrical power constraints have disrupted this trend, requiring more drastic changes to both hardware and software solutions. Here, we present details of the Cray XK6 architecture that achieves increased performance with the use of GPU accelerators. We review software development efforts in the LAMMPS molecular dynamics package that have been implemented in order to utilize hybrid high performance computers. We present benchmark results for solid-state, biological, and mesoscopic systems and discuss some challenges for utilizing hybrid systems. We present some early work in improving application performance on the XK6 and performance results for the simulation of liquid copper nanostructures with the embedded atom method.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 186-195 |
Number of pages | 10 |
Journal | Procedia Computer Science |
Volume | 9 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - 2012 |
Event | 12th Annual International Conference on Computational Science, ICCS 2012 - Omaha, NB, United States Duration: Jun 4 2012 → Jun 6 2012 |
Funding
This research was conducted in part under the auspices of the Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research, Office of Science, U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725 with UT-Battelle, LLC. This research used resources of the Leadership Computing Facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725 with UT-Battelle, LLC. Accordingly, the U.S. Government retains a non-exclusive, royalty-free license to publish or reproduce the published form of this contribution, or allow others to do so, for U.S. Government purposes. M.F.C, J.D.F and P.D.R. acknowledge support from the U.S. Department of Energy, Basic Energy Sciences, Materials Sciences and Engineering Division for supporting the portions of this work related to the design of molecular dynamics computational experiments. The authors thank Yuxing Peng (University of Chicago) for help with long-range partitions. Additionally, we thank Wayne Joubert and the referees for their critical review of the work.
Keywords
- Embedded atom method
- GPU
- Materials
- Molecular dynamics
- Supercomputer
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- General Computer Science