In record time, Vikram Gavini's lab crossed a big milestone in viewing tiny things.
The three-person team at the University of Michigan crafted a program that uses complex math to peer deep into the world of the atom. It could advance many fields of science, as well as the design for everything from lighter cars to more effective drugs.
The code, available in the group's open source repository, got a 20x speedup in just 18 months thanks to GPUs.
A Journey to the Summit In mid-2018 the team was getting ready to release a version of the code running on CPUs when it got an invite to a GPU hackathon at Oak Ridge National Lab, the home of Summit, one of the world's fastest supercomputers.
We thought, let's go see what we can achieve, said Gavini, a professor of mechanical engineering and materials science.
We quickly realized our code could exploit the massive parallelism in GPUs, said Sambit Das, a post-doc from the lab who attended the five-day event.
Before it was over, Das and another lab member, Phani Motamarri, got 5x speedups moving the code to CUDA and its libraries. They also heard the promise of much more to come.
From 5x to 20x Speedups in Six Months Over the next few months, the lab continued to tune its program for analyzing 100,000 electrons in 10,000 magnesium atoms. By early 2019, it was ready to run on Summit.
Taking an iterative approach, the lab ran increasing portions of its code on more and more of Summit's nodes. By April, it was using most of the system's 27,000 GPUs, getting nearly 46 petaflops of performance, 20x prior work.
It was an unheard-of result for a program based on density functional theory (DFT), the complex math that accounts for quantum interactions among subatomic particles.
Distributed Computing for Difficult Calculations DFT calculations are so complex and fundamental that they currently consume a quarter of the time on all public research computers. They are the subject of 12 of the 100 most-cited scientific papers, used to analyze everything from astrophysics to DNA strands.
Initially, the lab reported its program used nearly 30 percent of Summit's peak theoretical capability, an unusually high efficiency rate. By comparison, most other DFT codes don't even report efficiency because they have difficulty scaling beyond use of a few processors.
It was really exciting to get to that point because it was unprecedented, said Gavini.
Recognition for a Math Milestone In late 2019, the group was named a finalist for a Gordon Bell award. It was the lab's first submission for the award that's the equivalent of a Nobel in high performance computing.
That provided a lot of visibility for our lab and our university, and I think this effort is just the beginning, Gavini said.
Indeed, since the competition, the lab pushed the code's performance to 64 petaflops and 38 percent efficiency on Summit. And it's already exploring its use on other systems and applications.
Seeking More Apps, Performance The initial work analyzed magnesium, a metal much lighter than the steel and aluminum used in cars and planes today, promising significant fuel savings. Last year, the lab teamed up with another group exploring how electrons move in DNA, work that could help other researchers develop more effective drugs.
The next big step is running the code on Perlmutter, a supercomputer using the latest NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs. Das reports he's already getting 4x speedups compared to the Summit GPUs thanks to the A100 GPUs' support for TensorFloat-32, a mixed-precision format that delivers both fast results and high accuracy.
The lab's program already offers 100x speedups compared to other DFT codes, but Gavini's not stopping there. He's already thinking about testing it on Fugaku, an Arm-based system that's currently the world's fastest supercomputer.
It's always exciting to see how far you can get, and there's always a next milestone. We see this as the beginning of a journey, he said.
Most recent headlines
06/10/2025
France T l visions, France's leading broadcaster, has received the 2025 EBU ...
04/09/2025
Monumental Sports & Entertainment (MSE), in collaboration with Dalet, has been a...
30/08/2025
WASHINGTON The Federal Communications Commission has adopted its FY 2025 Regulatory Fees Order that establishes the regulatory fee rates for the broadcast stati...
29/08/2025
Australian Red Cross and SBS launch training to help workplaces in the fight aga...
29/08/2025
The National Film and Video Foundation (NFVF), an agency of the Department of Sp...
29/08/2025
L3Harris Technologies has concentrated decades of expertise across the entire enterprise to develop affordable and reliable best-of-breed solutions to rapidly c...
29/08/2025
BURBANK, Calif. The CW Network and the Pac-12 Conference have announced a new media rights deal that will extend their broadcast partnership beginning with the ...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK Gracenote has released a new analysis of its global video dataset showing that the number of FAST channels grew nearly 14% from Q1 2025 and 76% since 2...
29/08/2025
SAN JOSE, Calif. Harmonic has announced a series of improvements to its live sports streaming solution that the company said will improve fan engagement, protec...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK and LOS ANGELES Fox Corp. and YouTube TV last night announced a renewal of the full portfolio of Fox networks, including Fox News Channel, Fox Business...
29/08/2025
Budapest, Hungary, August 2025 - The integration of Microsoft Teams Rooms (MTR) with Lightware's Taurus universal matrix switchers delivers a new level of f...
29/08/2025
Frequency, the engine behind many of the world's best-known streaming television channels, today announced it will launch Studio Live, a next-generation uni...
29/08/2025
In an era when AI and cyber resilience are essential, Scality will mark the 10th anniversary of Scality Day on October 16, 2025 in Paris. This flagship global e...
29/08/2025
Disguise's In-House Creative and Technical Teams Pre-Visualised, Programmed and Delivered Content for the Experience, All Powered by EX 3+
Technology solu...
29/08/2025
Disguise will be demonstrating the latest workflows for TV, film and live events on a number of partner booths at the show
Disguise, the industry-leading tech...
29/08/2025
STOCKHOLM, Sweden Accedo will showcase Accedo Compose, its AI agent-powered modular orchestration layer that assists streaming providers in transitioning client...
29/08/2025
LOS ANGELES Cineverse has announced that it is working with Xperi to bring four of its streaming channels to automobiles for the first time as part of the DTS A...
29/08/2025
DALLAS & ATLANTA Gray Media has announced an agreement with the sports streaming service Victory+ to simulcast 17 Dallas Stars NHL games in 15 television market...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK AND CULVER CITY Comcast NBCUniversal and Amazon have announced new and extended distribution agreements that will expand the content available on their...
29/08/2025
FOOTHILL RANCH, Calif. RED Digital Cinema will feature its Cine-Broadcast Module supporting live broadcast workflows during IBC2025, Sept. 12-15, at the RAI Ams...
29/08/2025
29 Aug 2025
Kyivstar Rings Opening Bell at Nasdaq Marking Landmark Listing and ...
29/08/2025
More than half of all NFL games live on Sky for the first timeFriday 29 August 2025
Sky Sports has announced a new three-year deal with the NFL, extending its ...
29/08/2025
Back to All News
RIV4LRIES: The Trailer of the New Series With Samuele Carrino ...
29/08/2025
Get ready for an inspiring and emotional insight into the world of competitive Irish dancing with My Story: Tomi Champion of the World airing on RT 2 this monda...
29/08/2025
RT has today announced that David McCullagh is to be the new presenter of RT Radio 1's flagship Today programme, which airs every weekday at 10am, replaci...
28/08/2025
By Kristin Feeley, Director, Documentary Film & Artist Programs
If you want to tell untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you've got ...
28/08/2025
Directed by Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert, Sundance Institute-supported Amer...
28/08/2025
Corridos have been a cornerstone of M sica Mexicana for generations, telling stories rooted in everyday life. Now, a new chapter is taking shape: motivational c...
28/08/2025
Los corridos han sido un pilar de la M sica Mexicana durante generaciones, contando historias enraizadas en la vida cotidiana. Ahora, un nuevo cap tulo est tom...
28/08/2025
Earlier this month, we promised our Verano Forever party would bring the heat, a...
28/08/2025
L3Harris will provide the Polish F-16V fleet with the Viper Shield electronic warfare system as part of an upgrade program....
28/08/2025
Bilbao, August 26, 2025 - AgileTV, an international television and video technol...
28/08/2025
Ken Wilkinson is an Emmy Awards nominated New York audio engineer who specialises in production sound mixing for film, commercial, episodic and documentary work...
28/08/2025
NEW YORK FuboTV today announced that it will launch Fubo Sports, a skinny bundle that focuses on sports with a subscription price of $56 monthly....
28/08/2025
NEVADA City, Calif. At IBC2025, Sept. 12-15 at the RAI Amsterdam, Telestream will debut its new Global Ingest strategy, introducing a next-generation ingest arc...
28/08/2025
Dr. Rhoda Bernard Releases Groundbreaking Debut Book on Accessible Arts Educatio...
28/08/2025
TAG Video Systems, the leader in software-based IP end-to-end workflow monitoring, deep probing, and real-time visualization, has named Oliver Gappa as Sales Di...
28/08/2025
AI-based voice enhancement will be among a series of innovations making their IBC 2025 debut on the DHD stand B46 in Hall 8 at the RAI Amsterdam Convention Cent...
28/08/2025
Telef nica Servicios Audiovisuales (TSA), the leading system integrator and service provider in the media sector in Spain, with the support of Appear, the globa...
28/08/2025
To fully immerse sailing fans in the world's biggest offshore yacht race, production company, Optical Media turned to LiveU's On-site Production solutio...
28/08/2025
Working with Calrec on its most recent overhaul, radio and television broadcaster, WNED has migrated to a fully IP infrastructure with multiple Type R consoles,...
28/08/2025
Cleeng, the Subscriber Retention Management (SRM ) inventor, has unveiled Cleeng Pro, the first-ever direct-to-consumer (D2C) subscription management platform t...
28/08/2025
Zixi, the industry leader in live broadcast-quality video over IP, today announced that French media distribution platform OKAST has selected Zixi to enable rel...
28/08/2025
Solution offers a streamlined, speaker-free architecture to optimize integration with premium external loudspeakers and advanced loudness metering
Nixer Pro Au...
28/08/2025
Cinegy, the premier provider of software-defined television technology, has announced a strategic partnership with Vision One Touch Film Production Services L.L...
28/08/2025
Telestream, a global leader in media workflow technologies, will debut its new Global Ingest strategy at IBC2025, introducing a next-generation ingest architect...
28/08/2025
Tier 1 operator selects Broadpeak to power high-performance, unified CDN solution across Norway, Sweden and Finland
Broadpeak, a leader in streaming and moneti...
28/08/2025
Leading video software provider, Synamedia, today announced that 24 Frames Digital, one of India's leading live event streaming service providers, has chose...
28/08/2025
Meet VisualOn at IBC2025: See What's Next in AI-Powered Video Streaming Join VisualOn at IBC2025 and discover how our AI-driven Optimizer and advanced media...
In record time, Vikram Gavini's lab crossed a big milestone in viewing tiny things.
