ARCHIVED: Petascale computing on the TeraGrid: Accelerating Nano-scale Transistor Innovation though Petascale Simulation

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Note: The project described in this document is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Office of Cyberinfrastructure (OCI) to use TeraGrid's petascale environments for highly advanced scientific analysis and simulations that advance the frontiers of scientific and engineering research. For more, see ARCHIVED: Petascale computing on the TeraGrid.

This project is developing a general-purpose simulation engine for modeling out-of-equilibrium electron transport in realistically extended devices in an atomistic material description containing millions of atoms using the non-equilibrium Green function (NEGF) formalism.

Forty years of transistor downscaling has led to atomic-scale features, making devices subject to unavoidable manufacturing irregularities at the atomic scale. A new approach to design that embraces the atomistic, quantum mechanical (QM) nature of the constituent materials is necessary to develop more powerful yet energy miserly devices. This demands the solution of non-equilibrium statistical QM in systems in excess of tens of million complex degrees of freedom. Computations of this magnitude have been impossible, due to the lack of sufficiently powerful computers. Petascale computing creates an opportunity to pursue a multi-scale design approach.

For more, see award abstract #0749140 on the NSF web site.