A team of scientists from IBM, ETH Zurich, Technical University of Munich and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have collaborated to simulate fluid dynamics in a move aimed at addressing healthcare and industrial needs.

Scientists used 6.4 million threads on LLNL’s 96 rack Sequoia IBM BlueGene/Q supercomputers to analyze the occurrence of bubbles collapsing inward for potential usages in designing fuel injectors and propellers, crushing kidney stones using high pressure and developing cancer therapies, IBM said Monday.

The team conducted the simulation using 13 trillion cells and reached 14.4 Petaflop sustained performance on Sequoia.

Petros Koumoutsakos, director of the Computational Science and Engineering Laboratory at ETH Zurich, said the team based the developments on finite volume procedures.

“We have also invested significant effort in designing software that takes advantage of todays parallel computer architectures,” Koumoutsakos adds.

Scientists resolved 15,000 bubbles and the result is expected to help further the analysis of cloud cavitation collapse phenomenon in which pressure variations cause vapor cavities to form in a liquid and bubbles to implode to create shockwaves for potential healthcare and industrial applications.

Alessandro Curioni, head of mathematical and computational sciences department at IBM Research – Zurich, said the team achieved that development by using hardware and software tools within the IBM BlueGene/Q platform.