A team of researchers at the University of Tokyo, the University of Tsukuba, RIKEN and Fujitsu has declared that the research findings of the silicon nanowires’ electron states obtained utilizing ‘K computer’ has won the ACM Gordon Bell Prize under the Peak-Performance category at the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis, SC11 conducted in Seattle, Washington.
Silicon nanowires have been recognized as a key material for future-generation semiconductors. The K computer is the most powerful supercomputer of the world. It proved its capability for the second time by obtaining a rating at 10.51 petaflops on the Linkpack scale.
In order to prove the K computer’s computational performance, quantum-mechanical calculations were done on a nanowire’s electron states with nearly 100,000 atoms, almost equal to the material’s actual size, and demonstrated 3.08 petaflops of execution performance or 43.6% of execution efficiency. The findings of the in-depth computations on the silicon nanowires’ electron states comprising 10,000 to 40,000 atoms verified that electron transport behavior will vary with the nanomaterial’s cross-sectional shape.
The application utilized in this study is one of the major applications created under the ‘Grand Challenges’ program of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. The Japan-based National Institute of Natural Sciences’ Institute for Molecular Science leads the Grand Challenges program in the nanotechnology field.
Source: http://www.riken.jp