Supercomputing at Work Special :

ERCIM News is the magazine of ERCIM. Published quarterly, it reports on joint actions of the ERCIM partners, and aims to reflect the contribution made by ERCIM to the European Community in Information Technology and Applied Mathematics. Through short articles and news items, it provides a forum for the exchange of information between the institutes and also with the wider scientific community. This issue has a circulation of 10,500 copies. The printed version of ERCIM News has a production cost of €8 per copy. Subscription is currently available free of charge. Contributions Contributions must be submitted to the local editor of your country Copyright Notice All authors, as identified in each article, retain copyright of their work Advertising For current advertising rates and conditions, see ERCIM News online edition The online edition is published at http://ercim-news.ercim.org/ Subscription Subscribe to ERCIM News by: contacting the ERCIM office (see address above) or by filling out the form at the ERCIM website: Cover illustration: Massively parallel simulations of aircraft wake instabilities An aircraft wake consists of powerful long-lasting trailing vortices. This potential hazard imposes safety distances, and thus limits airport traffic. Thousands-of-processors high-resolution simulations can accurately capture fast growing instabilities which perturb the vortices and can therefore accelerate their decay. The cover shows the volume rendering of vorticity in the case of a fast-growing instability. Secondary vortices generated by the stabilizer reconnect with the wing ones and result in a disturbance that propagates along and inside the vortex cores. Just eleven years ago, the first supercomputer, Intel's ASCI Red, broke the barrier of more than one trillion (short-scale number system) floating point operations per second: one Ter-aflop/s. Last month, a new system at the Los Alamos National Lab, nicknamed 'Roadrunner', achieved for the first time the staggering result of one Petaflop/s or one quadrillion floating point operations per second. Roadrunner was benchmarked through the Linpack benchmark code, which is used to compare and rank the performance of the 500 fastest supercomput-ers worldwide (http://www.top500.org). The enormous 1000-fold increase in performance of supercomputers in the last eleven years highlights the dramatic progress of these universal instruments. Supercomputers are the base on which has been built the continuous advancement of computer simulations , now a key element in the scientific and industrial competitiveness of knowledge-based economies in the 21st century. Simulations are the engines for industrial fields such as aeronautics, and the automotive, pharmaceutical, oil and …