Abstract

Materials Cloud is a platform designed to enable open and seamless sharing of resources for computational science, driven by applications in materials modelling. It hosts 1) archival and dissemination services for raw and curated data, together with their provenance graph, 2) modelling services and virtual machines, 3) tools for data analytics, and pre-/post-processing, and 4) educational materials. Data is citable and archived persistently, providing a comprehensive embodiment of the FAIR principles that extends to computational workflows. Materials Cloud leverages the AiiDA framework to record the provenance of entire simulation pipelines (calculations performed, codes used, data generated) in the form of graphs that allow to retrace and reproduce any computed result. When an AiiDA database is shared on Materials Cloud, peers can browse the interconnected record of simulations, download individual files or the full database, and start their research from the results of the original authors. The infrastructure is agnostic to the specific simulation codes used and can support diverse applications in computational science that transcend its initial materials domain. Comment: 19 pages, 8 figure Document type: Article

Abstract

We report on resent N-body simulations of galaxy formation performed on the GRAPE-4 (GRAvity PipE) system, a special-purpose computer for astrophysical N-body simulations. We review the astrophysical motivation, the algorithm, the actual performance, and the price per performance. The performance obtained is 332 Gflops averaged over 185 hours for a simulation of a galaxy formation with 786,400 particles. The price per performance obtained is 4,600 dollars per Gflops. The configuration used for the simulation consists of 1,269 pipeline processors and has a peak speed of 663 Gflops. Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures, Proceedings of Supercomputing 96, 1996 Gordon Bell Prize (performance), also available at http://scxy.tc.cornell.edu/sc96/proceedings/SC96PROC/FUKUSHIG/INDEX.HTM (SC96) or at http://grape.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp/pub/people/fukushig/paper/list.html (Tokyo)