Press Release

"XC30 System," (*1) a supercomputer run by the Center for Computational Astrophysics, National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (CfCA, NAOJ), became fully functional at the Mizusawa VLBI Observatory of NAOJ and opened for open use on April 1, 2013. The XC30 System is the 4th generation of supercomputer to be operated by CfCA. In comparison to the 3rd generation supercomputer, the XT4 System which was introduced by CfCA in 2007, it has about eight times as many CPUs installed to carry out calculations. The full system has realized a theoretical performance peak of 502TFLOPS (*2).

With the introduction of the XC30 System, astronomical research based on numerical simulation is expected to make substantial progress. For example, more detailed structures of celestial bodies can be abstracted through numerical simulations. Also, it will be possible to numerically simulate the evolution of the celestial bodies for longer periods of time. It may be also possible to perform radically new simulations with consideration of physical processes that had been difficult to be included due to limitations in computer performance.

Mizusawa VLBI Observatory with the XC30 System and the NAOJ Mitaka Campus are linked with a high-speed line (*3), and researchers nationwide can remotely access the system. The Mitaka Campus is equipped with analytic servers for analyzing/visualizing the results of simulations made on the supercomputer and file servers for storing computational data.

*1: The system was developed by Cray Japan. For more information please visit: http://wwwjp.cray.com/products/XC30-01.html
*2: FLOPS (for FLoating-point Operations Per Second) is a unit of computational speed. 1TFLOPS and 1PFLOPS are equivalent to a trillion and a thousand trillion floating-point operations per second, respectively.
*3: New Generation Network Testbed JGN-X. http://www.jgn.nict.go.jp

Images

XC30(ATERUI)
Photograph by Makoto Shizugami(Mizusawa VLBI Observatory, CfCA, NAOJ)
Credit:CfCA, NAOJ
high resolution: JPEG(6.9MB)

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Example of Calculation
Calculation and image by Tomoya Takiwaki (CfCA, NAOJ)

Central engine of supernova explosion.
A star whose mass is bigger than about 10 solar masses evolves to a red giant. The core of the red giant shrinks by its strong gravitational force and produces a very dense neutron star (pulsar). The supernova explosion is thought to be the phenomenon that the high energy neutrinos radiated from the new-born neutron star blows up the stellar outer layers. This scenario is believed to be promising, however, is not verified yet despite 50 years of the continuous effort of the astrophysicists. To solve the problem, 3-dimensional hydrodynamical simulations with neutrino transport is essential. With the utilization of XC30, we have succeeded in the simulation of supernova explosion of a star with 13 solar masses. The figure shows the contour of the entropy. The red region indicates the heated material by the neutrinos. Our past study using CfCA's previous system of XT4 could not reproduce minute convective structures as shown in the figure since its number of the spacial grids is not enough to resolve them. The new simulation is performed with 100 times of the computational resources of the past one and achieves the finest spacial grids in the world (384x144x304). More reliable results are obtained due to the high spacial resolution and improved micro physics about neutrino reactions. This simulation requires one day of CPU times with 1368 node (21888core) of XC30 for 0.02 second of simulation time. This computation cannot be performed without supercomputers like XC30 since 0.5 second of the simulation is necessary to judge whether supernova is successful or not.

Credit:CfCA, NAOJ
high resolution: JPEG (274 KB)

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