Researchers have achieved a breakthrough in fluid dynamics supercomputing.

They used 6.4 million threads on one of the fastest supercomputers in the world to set a new record for flow simulations.

The team, comprising researchers from Switzerland’s ETH Zurich University and IBM Research along with the Technical University of Munich and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), employed 13 trillion cells – the highest ever simulation in fluid dynamics – on LLNL’s 96-rack ‘Sequoia’ IBM BlueGene/Q supercomputer.

Fluid dynamics is the science dealing with the natural science of fluids and gases in motion, and is used for practical applications such as calculating the forces experienced by aircraft in flight.

The experiment achieved a 14.4 Petaflop constant performance on Sequoia, which is 73% of the supercomputer’s hypotheticalpeak.

ETH Zurich Computational Science and Engineering Laboratory director Petros Koumoutsakos said that in the last 10 years researchers have addressed a fundamental problem of computational science – the ever increasing gap of hardware capabilities and their effective utilisation to solve engineering problems.

"We have based our developments on finite volume methods, perhaps the most established and widespread method for engineering flow simulations," Koumoutsakos said.

"We have also invested significant effort in designing software that takes advantage of todays parallel computer architectures.

"It is the proper integration of computer science and numerical mathematics that enables such advances."

According to researchers, simulations also determined 15,000 bubbles, a 150-fold growth over earlier research and a 20-fold drop in time to solution, paving the way for investigation of a complex phenomenon dubbed ‘cloud cavitation collapse’.

IBM Research – Zurich mathematical and computational sciences department head Alessandro Curioni said that researchers were able to accomplish this using an array of pioneering hardware and software features within the IBM BlueGene/Q platform that allowed the fast development of ultra-scalable code which achieves an order of magnitude better performance than previous state-of-the-art technology.

"While the Top500 [supercomputer] list will continue to generate global interest, the applications of these machines and how they are used to tackle some of the world’s most pressing human and business issues more accurately quantifies the evolution of supercomputing," Curioni said.