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Gregory Brown named a winner of the 2009 ACM Gordon Bell Prize.

A team including Florida State University's Gregory Brown was named a winner Thursday of the 2009 ACM Gordon Bell Prize, which honors the world's highest-performing scientific computing applications. The results were announced in Portland, Ore., during the SC09 international supercomputing conference.

Dr. Brown, a Scientist with Parallax Research, Inc., in Tallahassee, holds a courtesy appointment in the FSU Department of Physics, where he has a long-standing collaboration with Prof. Rikvold and co-supervises his graduate students. Prof. Rikvold says: "My students and I are extremely lucky and very honored that a superb computational physicist like Dr. Brown chooses to be an advisor to my research group. Through his courtesy appointment he makes his unique expertise in extreme high-performance computing available to our graduate students."

Led by Markus Eisenbach the team, consisting of colleagues from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Florida State University, and the Institute for Theoretical Physics and Swiss National Supercomputing Center, achieved 1.84 thousand trillion calculations per second (1.84 petaflops) using an application that analyzes the effect of temperature on magnetic systems. The application achieved this performance on ORNL's Cray XT5 Jaguar system, making use of more than 223,000 processing cores and reaching nearly 80 percent of Jaguar's peak performance.

The application combines a method which solves the Dirac equation describing the relativistic wave equation for electron behavior with a Monte Carlo method known as Wang-Landau which guides the relativistic calculation. This sets aside empirical models and allows accurate calculation from first principles of the temperature above which a material loses its magnetism. By accurately revealing the magnetic properties of specific materials--even materials that have not yet been produced -- the project promises to boost the search for stronger, more stable magnets, thereby contributing to advances in such areas as magnetic storage and the development of lighter, stronger motors for electric vehicles.

ACM Gordon Bell Prize
 

The Gordon Bell Prizes are awarded each year to recognize outstanding achievement in high-performance computing. The purpose of the award is to track the progress over time of parallel computing, with particular emphasis on rewarding innovation in applying high-performance computing to applications in science. Prizes are awarded for peak performance as well as special achievements in scalability and time-to-solution on important science and engineering problems and low price/performance. Financial support of the $10,000 award is provided by Gordon Bell, a pioneer in high-performance and parallel computing.