In Brief
World Record Algorithm from Jülich
Computer simulations can be decisively accelerated using a method improved by Jülich scientists. During a test run on the super-computer JUGENE, the researchers processed a system featuring 3,011,561,968,121 particles in about eleven minutes – a world record! The process is an optimised form of one of the top 10 algorithms for scientific simulations, the so-called Fast Multipole Method (FMM). As of now, the scientists Ivo Kabadshow and Holger Dachsel from the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) provide the source code free of charge to interested users.
If one was to directly compute the interaction between three trillion particles, a super-computer, such as JUGENE with its 294,912 processors, would require 32,000 years for a single run. A conventional PC would be busy even for a billion years. Large-scale simulations, such as in the field of astrophysics pertaining to the evolution of the universe, so far were limited to several hundred billion particles. To push this boundary even higher, the Jülich scientists "tinkered" with the required storage. "Super-computers, such as JUGENE, often have very small storage capacity per processor in spite of their extreme computing power, usually less than a PC. This is why the particle number is limited rather by the storage capacity than by the processor performance", says scientist Ivo Kabadshow.
