Section site map: News

• News Home
• Media Press Room
• User/System News

2005 News Stories

• GADU/GNARE Uses TeraGrid For Protein Sequence Analysis
• TeraGyroid: Gyroids on the TeraGrid
• TeraShake: Simulating a Big Shake in Southern California Basins
• Seismic Modeling and Oil Reservoir Simulations with TeraGrid
• Improving Groundwater Cleanup Decision-Making with TeraGrid
• Harnessing TeraGrid to the Sky: Understanding Dark Energy
• AMANDA and TeraGrid: Exploring the Violent Universe
• TeraGrid Science Gateways: NanoHUB
• Identifying Brain Disorders with TeraGrid

News

TeraGyroid: Gyroids on the TeraGrid

A Boston-U.K. team of scientists linked more than 6,000 processors and 17 teraflops of computing at six different facilities on two continents. Led by University of London chemist Peter Coveney and Tufts University mathematician Bruce Boghosian in a three-month project centered on the Supercomputing 2003 conference in Phoenix, this Grid-based effort ? called the TeraGyroid Project ? yielded significant scientific understanding and exemplifies how Grid computing can give a powerful boost to large-scale scientific computation.

Awarded the HPC Challenge for "Most Innovative Data-Intensive Application" at SC 2003 in Phoenix, the TeraGyroid team also received a 2004 ISC Award, the major supercomputing award in Europe, for Integrated Data and Information Management. With an innovative and powerful computational approach—applying the lattice-Boltzmann model to amphiphilic fluids (such as oil, water and surfactant) as particles on a 3D lattice—the TeraGyroid project simulates complex materials shapes, known as gyroids, with properties in between solid and liquid. Gyroids, which form within amphiphilic fluids, have important applications in controlled drug release and biosensors.

Using the TeraGrid and the Globus Toolkit, the TeraGyroid team marshaled an array of computational resources at many locations. They used computing, storage, and visualization facilities at PSC, NCSA, SDSC, and Argonne along with resources at Daresbury Lab and Manchester, UK. Their simulations employed "computational steering" to zero-in on the gyroid shape of scientific interest. They first did many independent simulations (at relatively low resolution) using six different systems (four in U.K. plus NCSA and SDSC) until they identified the gyroid structure of interest. They then ?checkpointed? this configuration for high resolution simulation. (They migrated checkpoints back and forth between continents at 300-400 Mbps).

For the large-scale simulation, using the HPCx system at Daresbury and the Terascale Computing System in Pittsburgh, they carried out the highest resolution lattice-Boltzmann model to date (over a billion grid points). Their results show ? among other things ? that amphiphilic fluids are non-Newtonian: their viscosity varies with rate of shear. The simulations provide greater detail of amphiphilic fluid dynamics than is possible to obtain by laboratory approaches.

Figure 1: One view, called the wishbone view, of a gyroid structure, which divides space into two interpenetrating regions or labyrinths.

More News Releases

Top