Advanced Computing, Mathematics and Data
Staff Awards & Honors
May 2011
Computational Researchers win NVIDIA CUDA Research Center
Congratulations to Drs. Oreste Villa and Antonino Tumeo, computational scientists at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, for their work that has earned PNNL the prestigious honor of being named a 2011 NVIDIA CUDA Research Center. Additionally, PNNL will receive early access to limited-availability systems, exclusive event invites with key researchers and academics, and a designated NVIDIA technical liaison.
Villa and Tumeo submitted a paper to NVIDIA that demonstrates how they accelerated scientific computing speeds using graphics processing units (GPUs). Their research was conducted as part of a project on software architectures under PNNL’s eXtreme Scale Computing Initiative (XSCI). The use of GPUs is growing and many consider them to be the future of this research direction due to their low cost and high-performance-per-Watt ratio. XSCI has been using GPUs for 3 years as users, purchasing systems as soon as they were available. Now, the group will be able to access all systems immediately.
PNNL is now one of 35 new CUDA Research Centers and CUDA Teaching Centers in 14 countries, further advancing the growth of parallel computing across the world. At PNNL, XSCI is using GPU-acceleration of the subsurface transport simulator STOMP to improve public safety by predicting flow of contaminants into underground waterways, and the computational chemistry simulation code NWChem to address key questions about processes such as photosynthesis, protein function, and combustion. The CUDA Research Center program fosters collaboration at institutions that are expanding the frontier of parallel computing.
