The prestigious Gordon Bell Prize is awarded each year internationally by ACM to recognize outstanding achievement in high-performance computing (HPC). An eight-member team from the University of Michigan, Indian Institute of Science and Oak Ridge National Lab was named as the winner of the 2023 ACM Gordon Bell Prize for their project, “Large-Scale Materials Modeling at Quantum Accuracy: Ab Initio Simulations of Quasicrystals and Interacting Extended Defects in Metallic Alloys.” The team demonstrated a paradigm shift in density functional theory calculations (DFT) that provided an accuracy commensurate with Quantum Many-Body methods in ground-state energies, while attaining an unprecedented performance of 659.7 PFLOPS (43.1% peak FP64 performance) on a material system involving 619,124 electrons using 8000 GPU nodes of the Frontier supercomputer, the world’s first and fastest exascale supercomputer. The award tracks the progress over time of parallel computing, with particular emphasis on rewarding innovation in high-performance computing applications in science, engineering and large-scale data analytics.
A celebratory achievement, marking the first time a research group from India has been a part of this prestigious accolade. The Indian Institute of Science (IISc) team led by Dr. Phani Motamarri, Assistant Professor in the Department of Computational and Data Sciences was instrumental in the development of scalable finite-element (FE) based methods for DFT calculations which include efficient eigensolver strategies combined with HPC innovations in FE-specific dense linear algebra, mixed precision algorithms involving asynchronous compute-communication. You can read more about the group’s current research activities at https://sites.google.com/view/matrix-lab/research
The implications of the award winning work can impact a diverse set of key scientific and technological problems, including, designing new catalytic materials for clean fuel production, better materials for energy storage, devising materials and mechanisms for carbon-di-oxide sequestration, discovering novel qubit materials for quantum computers, to name a few.
More details about the award description can be found at https://awards.acm.org/binaries/content/assets/press-releases/2023/november/gordon-bell-prize-2023.pdf and https://www.acm.org/media-center/2023/november/gordon-bell-prize-2023
The related paper can be found at https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3581784.3627037
