Stanford’s Engineering Center for Turbulence Research (you know, the SECTR) has claimed a new record in computer science by running a fluid dynamics problem that spans more than one million cores. According to the story in R&D Magazine, it’s the first time this many cores have been devoted to a fluid simulation. In this case, they were modeling jet engine exhaust in an attempt to reduce the noise during takeoffs and landings.

If you need a million-core system to run your code, there aren’t a lot of choices today. In fact, there are only two million-core plus supercomputers that we know of: 1) Oak Ridge’s AMD/NVIDIA-based Titan; and 2) Lawrence Livermore National Lab’s Bluegene/Q-based Sequoia. The Stanford guys used the 1,572,000-core Sequoia system, probably because it’s an easy drive from Palo Alto to Livermore, CA. (Head over the Dunbarton Bridge, then take the 880 to the 580. That’s how I’d go.)

The article alluded to the difficulty inherent in pushing applications to this scale. I was surprised to read that the combined Stanford/LLNL team was able to pull this off with only “a few weeks” of planning and tuning. That’s definitely a resume-worthy achievement.