Dr. Feliciano Giustino from the Oden Institute's Center for Quantum Materials Engineering has been selected to participate in the fourth Texascale Days event hosted by the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC). Research teams are provided exclusive access to Frontera, one of the world’s largest academic supercomputers, for 24 hours. With almost 8,000 nodes, the system is typically shared among dozens of projects. Texascale Days provides full access to individual research groups aiming to solve even bigger problems. Giustino is a core faculty member at the Oden Institute. He is a quantum physicist, chemist, and materials scientist as well as an expert in high-performance computing (HPC). Known for his development of materials with innovative electronic structure, Giustino has helped discover several new semiconductors for applications in energy and optoelectronics.
So, what is he going to do with 8,000 supercomputing nodes in 24 hours? “We will use our time on Frontera to test the scaling of our open source code used for calculations of electron-phonon interactions (EPW) and see how far it can go,” Giustino said. “It has never been tested on an entire supercomputer before so this opportunity with Texascale Days will allow us to understand what needs improving so we can prepare for the next level of supercomputing — the exascale.”