Awards

Yasuhiro Idomura from CCSE’s Computer Science Research and Development Office, along with Shinya Maeyama and Motoki Nakata from JAEA’s Fusion Research Division, and Tomo-Hiko Watanabe, Akihiro Ishizawa and Masanori Nunami from the National Institute of Fusion Science, won the ‘SC13 Best Poster Award’ at the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC13), held in Denver, USA, November 17-23, 2013.

This prize was awarded for the most outstanding achievement in the field of computational science among 80 posters presented at the conference. The poster title was ‘Optimizations of a spectral/finite difference gyrokinetic code for improved strong scaling toward million cores’. The work involved developing massive parallelization algorithms to run the first-principles fusion plasma turbulence simulation code GKV on the K Computer using ~600,000 computing cores. Dramatic speedups in processing performance were achieved, which meant multi-scale turbulence simulations with around 100,000 times the spatio-temporal resolution of conventional calculations could be realized. Valuable results applicable to ITER were obtained for the heat transfer from electron turbulence.

This research was supported by the HPCI Strategic Program field 4 on “Next Generation Manufacturing, the HPCI K Computer General Use project “Fusion Plasma Turbulence Simulation”, and the G8 Research Councils Initiative for Multilateral Research Funding project “Exascale Fusion Simulations”. The research was conducted in collaboration between Japan Atomic Energy Agency and the National Institute for Fusion Science.