ACADEMIA
LSU-led Research Team Receives Department of Energy Award for Supercomputing Research
A research team led by Mark Jarrell, Ph.D., LSU Department of Physics & Astronomy and LSU’s Center for Computation & Technology, was among the recipients for the 2010 Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment, or INCITE, program awards.
The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science supports these awards to promote advanced scientific research conducted on machines at the nation’s leadership computing facilities, Oak Ridge and Argonne national laboratories. The supercomputers at these laboratories are the largest and fastest in the United States dedicated primarily to academic research.
Through the INCITE program awards, research teams can propose projects in science or engineering that require advanced computational technology, and can receive user time on these powerful computing systems.
Jarrell’s research project, “Next Generation Multi-Scale Quantum Simulation Software for Strongly Correlated Materials,” is a collaborative effort that includes scientists from LSU, University of California-Davis, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and Ohio Supercomputer Center. This project received 17,000,000 user hours on the Cray XT supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.
This research focuses on materials science, in which scientists focus on the basic material properties of strongly correlated electronic materials, such as magnets, magnetic-resistant objects and high-temperature superconductors. These materials are ideal for creating new devices and technologies, since scientists can completely change their properties by simply tuning some parameters through applying pressure or magnetic field.
Because the unexpected and changing properties of these compounds are too complex to study with conventional approaches, scientists must use high-performance computers to run simulations that can model these materials, which gives them insight to predict their properties. Computer simulations are an efficient way to study material properties, and it is faster and cheaper to test ideas with computer simulations than to address them by hand in the laboratory.
Jarrell and other members of this research team will use the hours they receive through the INCITE award to advance materials science research on a more powerful machine.
“This method, and the opportunity to use the Cray Jaguar XT5 machine, gives us a chance to study model systems with the precision that was previously impossible,” Jarrell said. “We hope our research will provide a more comprehensive understanding of the makeup and basic properties of these materials,”
For more information on the INCITE program, please visit http://www.er.doe.gov/ascr/incite/index.html.
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