High-energy physics demands high-power computing

Thomas Katsouleas, professor of electrical engineering and electrophysics at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, is former co-chair of HPCC's Faculty Advisory Council. Co-author of a recent National Research Council Report on High Energy Density Physics, he is co-director of the newly forming ORION Center for Advanced Accelerator and Beam Physics Research at USC, Stanford and UCLA.

Katsouleas and his collaborators achieved international renown in 2001 by demonstrating for the first time that particle beams at a plasma-gas interface can exhibit refraction — a phenomenon familiar in the study of light beams, but one never before observed in the study of particle beams. A supercomputer simulation of the experiment, conducted at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, made the discovery possible.

To follow up on their refraction discovery, Professor Katsouleas's research team has used HPCC's Linux cluster for most of their heavy computations, creating simulations for their work on plasma lenses and afterburners designed to achieve high-energy interactions. Katsouleas's group must create full-scale simulations in three dimensions that predict the behavior of roughly 100 million particles over the entire span of an experiment. The path and behavior of each particle has to be computed through 100,000 separate time frames, which means that the HPCC machine computes one quadrillion individual 3-D particle snapshots per simulation.

Research on plasma, the most common form of matter, helps to provide a deeper understanding of the universe. Plasma research also yields new manufacturing techniques, new medical and consumer products, and the prospect of abundant energy.