The automotive supplier, the University of Southern Denmark (SDU) and the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon have received an allocation of 43 million computing hours for their joint fundamental research project. The aim is to promote understanding of tire and road wear particles, and more specifically the decomposition of rubber polymers.
Thanks to the European PRACE (Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe) infrastructure, and the computing power allocated on GENCI's Joliot-Curie machine, Continental, the University of Southern Denmark (SDU) and the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon have been able to carry out more in-depth and larger-scale simulations.
"With the help of the Joliot-Curie supercomputer, we can for the first time carry out complete simulations at the molecular level. The results of this fundamental research will contribute to a more complete understanding of the formation of tire and road wear particles, and enable us to design the materials we use for tire construction even more sustainably in the future," says Dr. Andreas Topp, Head of Materials, Process Development and Industrialization for the Tire Sector at Continental.
The SKL partition of GENCI's Joliot-Curie supercomputer housed at the TGCC (CEA's Très Grand Centre de Calcul) contributed to this work thanks to its 9.4 petaflops. With a cumulative performance of over 22 million billion calculations per second, Joliot-Curie is one of the fastest supercomputers in the European Union.