TRILLION-ATOM MOLECULAR DYNAMICS BECOMES A REALITY

By utilizing the molecular dynamics code SPaSM on Livermore's BlueGene/L architecture, consisting of 212992 IBM PowerPC440 700 MHz processors, a molecular dynamics simulation was run with one trillion atoms. To demonstrate the practicality and future potential of such ultra large-scale simulations, the onset of the mechanical shear instability occurring in a system of Lennard-Jones particles arranged in a simple cubic lattice was simulated. The evolution of the instability was analyzed on-the-fly using the in-house developed massively parallel graphical object-rendering code MD-render.