FSU Physics Researcher Awarded for Achievements with Computing Applications

A team including The Florida State University’s Gregory Brown has been named the winner of the 2009 Association for Computing Machinery’s Gordon Bell Prize, which honors the world’s highest-performing scientific computing applications.
The results were announced Nov. 19 in Portland, Ore., during the “Supercomputing Conference ’09” international supercomputing conference.

Brown, a scientist with Parallax Research Inc. in Tallahassee, holds a courtesy appointment in the Florida State University Department of Physics, where he has a longstanding collaboration with Professor Per Rikvold and co-supervises Rikvold’s graduate students.
“My students and I are extremely lucky and very honored that a superb computational physicist like Dr. Brown choses to be an adviser to my research group,” Rikvold said. “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 in Tennessee, The 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 Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Cray XT5 Jagaur 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 that 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.