Enlighten Your Research 3 awards
Computer scientists from VU Amsterdam, astronomers from Leiden, and climate researchers from Utrecht together have won the sustainability prize in the Enlighten Your Research 3 (EYR3) competition.
EYR3 is a competition organised by SURFnet, SARA, BiG Grid, and NWO, to promote excellent research requiring state-of-the-art ICT infrastructure. The awarded sustainability prize consists of the free use of the requested infrastructure for a two-year period, support for implementation, and prize money of EUR 15,000. The granted lightpaths between Leiden and Amsterdam will be used for high-performance distributed multi-model / multi-kernel simulations using the Astrophysical Multipurpose Software Environment (AMUSE).
AMUSE is a Dutch software project currently being developed at Leiden University. The aim of AMUSE is to provide a software framework for large-scale simulations of a wide range of astrophysical systems, in which existing codes for gravitational dynamics, stellar evolution, hydrodynamics and radiative transfer can be easily coupled. Some of these codes run fine on a regular desktop computer, others perform much better on a GPU, conventionally used for gaming. Many calculations are so computationally intensive that they can only be performed on supercomputing facilities. Using the smart software package Ibis, developed by computer scientists from VU Amsterdam, simulations can be performed using different computational facilities (clusters, grids, clouds, etc.) at once. This is known as 'jungle computing' and ensures the most efficient use of computational resources, with each component serving the purpose to which it is best suited. Apart from fast, this also makes the simulations as 'green' as possible, since no energy is wasted in inefficient use of resources.
Jury comments:
"This proposal distinguishes itself from the other proposals because the lightpath is a component of the simulation instrument itself."
"This proposal deserves the sustainability prize because of the way it utilises smart software that makes efficient use of the architecture and the resources."
More information:
AMUSE
Ibis
Enlighten Your Research
image credit: Gerrit Quast