SCHEDULE: NOV 10-16, 2007

Extending Stability Beyond CPU-Millennium: Micron-Scale Atomistic Simulation of Kelvin-Helmholtz Instability

Session: Gordon Bell Prize

Event Type: Gordon Bell Finalist, Awards

Time: 11:10am - 11:30am

Session Chair: David H Bailey

Author(s): James N. Glosli, Kyle J. Caspersen, John A. Gunnels, David F. Richards, Robert E. Rudd, Frederick H. Streitz

Location: A3 / A4

Abstract:
The Kelvin-Helmholtz (KH) instability, occurring when fluid layers undergo shear flow, is responsible for the wave patterns seen, e.g., on a windblown ocean or as billows on cloud tops. Although the transition from smooth to turbulent flow has been studied extensively, the trend towards smaller length scales in both experiments and continuum modeling raises questions concerning applicability of the hydrodynamic approximation as atomic lengths are approached. Molecular dynamics simulations naturally handle the atomic scale, but have been limited to lengths of less than a micron. With BlueGene/L computer, we can model micron sized samples with atomic resolution.

We report the first micron-scale simulation of a KH instability modeled using molecular dynamics. A simulation using the ddcMD code to model over 2 billion atoms ran for a week on 131,072 processors of BlueGene/L, requiring over 2.8 CPU-millennia to complete. We measure the performance of our current implementation to be 54.4 Tflop/s

This paper can be found in the ACM Digital Libaries
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Chair/Author Details:

David H Bailey (Chair)
Lawrence Berkeley Lab

James N. Glosli
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Kyle J. Caspersen
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

John A. Gunnels
IBM Corporation

David F. Richards
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Robert E. Rudd
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Frederick H. Streitz
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

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