Team preparing for a billion-dollar telescope selected for the Nobel Prize in supercomputing



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An international team led by the University of Western Australia was one of six finalists for the prestigious Gordon Bell Prize for outstanding achievements in high performance computing.

ICRAR researchers

The group was shortlisted for the award, commonly referred to as the “Nobel Prize in Supercomputing,” for their work in developing data pipelines for the future Square Kilometer Array (SKA) telescope and for their test on the Summit supercomputer.

The team used Summit, the fastest supercomputer in the world at the time, to process simulated observations of the early Universe prior to the construction of the telescope in Western Australia and South Africa.

Head of Data Intensive Astronomy Professor Andreas Wicenec, who is based at UWA, said construction on the billion-dollar SKA project is expected to begin next year.

“Once completed, the SKA will be the largest radio telescope in the world and one of the largest data generators in the world,” he said.

“The low-frequency portion of the telescope alone is expected to have more than 130,000 antennas in its early stage, generating about 550 gigabytes of data every second.”

To process the data at this scale, Professor Wicenec said the team used a cluster of 4,560 computers, with 27,360 high-end GPUs and 191,520 CPU cores.

“The entire simulation ran for about three hours at an average of 64.9 PFLOPs, or 64,900,000,000,000,000 math operations, per second,” he said.

“The fastest data write speed we achieved was 925 GB per second, and the actual throughput of the full simulation was about a factor of two better than the SKA required.”

Professor Wicenec said the team was surprised but thrilled to be a Gordon Bell Prize finalist.

“I wasn’t expecting that at all given the caliber of the previous winners and the highly sophisticated nature of their designs,” he said.

“We didn’t have the Gordon Bell Prize in mind when we decided to do this job, so it’s great to be recognized for the outstanding performance of the multinational team.”

The project was born from the collaboration between ICRAR, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and Shanghai Astronomical Observatory (SHAO).

The group’s nomination for the award was supported by SKA Director-General Professor Philip Diamond and Director of the United States National Radio Astronomy Observatory, Dr. Tony Beasley.

The ACM Gordon Bell Prize was established in the 1980s with a nominal award of $ 100 for anyone who could pass Amdahl’s Law and prove that parallel computing made sense.

Today, the award continues to track the progress of parallel computing, while rewarding innovation in applying high-performance computing to science, engineering and data analytics at scale.

In previous years, the finalists presented their work in person before an awards ceremony at the annual SC supercomputing conference.

In 2020, the conference and awards ceremony took place virtually, with the award ultimately awarded to a nine-member team from Chinese and American institutions for their project, “Pushing the limit of molecular dynamics with ab initio precision. to 100 million atoms with machine learning. “

See also: World’s fastest supercomputer processes enormous data rates in preparation for mega-telescope project

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