super[b]computing at the Faculty of Geosciences and Environment
This year’s Nvidia GPU Technology Conference to take place in San Jose, Silicon Valley, CA. Besides the opening keynote by CEO Jensen Huang, a former researcher from the Swiss Geocomputing Centre, Ludovic Räss, gave a talk on geo-supercomputing. Recording is accessible hereafter or on GTC on-demand:
RESOLVING SPONTANEOUS NONLINEAR MULTI-PHYSICS FLOW LOCALISATION IN 3-D: TACKLING HARDWARE LIMIT
For further information, feel free to contact lraess[at]stanford.edu.
The 2019 GPU course will target CUDA aware MPI:
1/ We will spend 3 days to program a CUDA C application to solve PDEs on a distributed memory system.
2/ We will discuss and implement how to overlap communication and computation in order to hide the MPI communication.
You can now access here majority of the speakers contribution to the Swiss Geocomputing Centre kick-off workshop. Thank you again very much to all the participants for their presence, and to all the speakers and poster presenters for their contributions.
Thibault Duretz, Ludovic Räss, Yury Podladchikov and Stefan Schmalholz recently published a new study about multi-physics couplings with focus on thermomechanical interactions.
Their contribution (accessible here) assesses the ability of an iterative technique to resolve nonlinear interactions between thermal and mechanical processes. This new approach to solution is particularly well suited for parallel devices, such GPUs. The authors benchmark their proposed solver against a direct-iterative type of more classical approach (TM2Di).
The codes illustrating and supporting this work can be accessed on the software page, or on the authors Bitbucket repository.
Jose Fernando Mendes
Professor at the University of Aveiro
Structural Properties of Multiplex Networks
Many complex systems, both natural, and man-made, can be represented as multiplex or interdependent networks. Multiple dependencies make a system more fragile: damage to one element can lead to avalanches of failures throughout the system.
In this talk I will present recent developments about the structural properties of multiplex networks. The transition founded is asymmetric. It is hybrid in nature, having a discontinuity like a first-order transition, but exhibiting critical behavior, only above the transition, like a second-order transition. A complete understanding of the transition cannot therefore be had without first understanding this critical behavior. I will discuss and describe the nature of such hybrid phase transitions and the appearance of avalanches at criticality.
José Fernando F. Mendes is a theoretical physicist working on Statistical Physics. His research focuses mainly in the study of complex systems and the structure and the evolution of complex networks like the World Wide Web, the Internet, biological networks, etc. Other interests are related with: granular media, self-organized criticality, non-equilibrium phase transitions, deposition models,etc.
He is co-author of over 130 scientific papers receiving about 18,000 citations, with his most cited works more than 3,000 citations.
The first version of submitted abstracts booklet is now available online. Check it out here !
Check here for program details and registration ! Workshop program is available, abstracts booklet, and registration are open. Register to follow keynotes, talks and poster sessions, as well as related social events.
Check here for program details and registration ! Workshop program is available, and registration are open. Register to follow keynotes, talks and poster sessions, as well as related social events.
Check here for details and registration ! Workshop preliminary program is available, and registration open soon. Register to follow keynotes, talks and poster sessions, as well as related social events.
In less than a month, a new compute node will augment the current GPU-based systems available at the Swiss Geocomputing Centre. Acquired thanks to the support of the FINV – Unil fond, this intensive compute node is the building block of tomorrow’s most powerful supercomputers. The 4U rack is composed of a 2U unit hosting two Intel Scalable Silver 4112 (4 cores) processors and 768 GB of RAM. The second 2U unit contains 8 state-of-the-art Tesla Volta 100 Nvlink GPUs. Each of the graphical processor is equipped with 32 GB of on-chip memory, and achieves a theoretical memory bandwidth close to 1 TB/s. The system features 8 Tesla V100 cards interconnected with the Nvidia Nvlink technology, and is capable to deliver an overall processing power up to 40’000 cores, which is the equivalent of 5’000 usual 8 cores computer processors (CPU).
Here is an insight of this computing monster, imaged while visiting today Colfax International, our provider and main tech partner, in Sunnyvale CA. Enjoy 🙂
High-permeability chimney genesis out of a source region in three dimensions. Colour plot (logarithmic scale) of dynamic permeability for two different lithologies, conductive sandstone and impermeable shale. Contoured values show a 1.5 order of magnitude increase in representative for the chimneys.
These motivations resulted in the development of a high-performance computing (HPC) application to resolve in 3-dimensions a coupled hydro-mechanical model. Very high spatial and temporal resolution is required in order to capture with accuracy the significant flow localisation in space and time. Ludovic Räss, Nina S.C. Simon and Yury Y. Podladchikov relied on the computing power delivered by the GPU-based supercomputer octopus, hosted by the Swiss Geocomputing Centre at the FGSE (Unil) and performed parallel simulations on 128 GPUs, i.e. more that 380’000 cores. This novel results permit to shed light on a previously unidentified fluid focusing mechanism that has a profound impact on assessing the evolution of leakage pathways in natural gas emissions, for reliable risk assessment for long-term subsurface waste storage, or CO2 sequestration.
Some additional movies are presented here:
Chimney formation mechanism. Three successive time laps of two-dimensional vertical (a–d) and horizontal (e,f) slices. (a,e) Dynamic permeability (logarithmic scale) field. The white arrows represent the fluid flux vectors, scaled by the maximal flux over time and directed into the chimney in the local drainage area, showing flux from outside to inside the chimneys. (b,f) Strain rate-dependent non-linear bulk viscosity values (logarithmic scale). (c,g) Effective pressure distribution. (d,h) Shear stress deformation magnitude (second invariant of the deviatoric stress tensor). White contour lines (b–d,f–h) represent the chimney extend, characterised by a significant increase (1.5 order of magnitude) in dynamic permeability.
Fluid flux through a horizontal slice of 1 m of low-permeable shale located at 1 m
above the source region showing corresponding typical circular craters or pockmarks.