NCSA Allocates Over 21 Million Node Hours in New Blue Waters Supercomputer Awards February 28, 2020 Announcements Blue WatersHPC Operations Share this page: Twitter Facebook LinkedIn Email By Alexis Meza Forty research teams, 16 Blue Waters Professors, and three strategic projects at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have been allocated computation time on the National Center for Supercomputing Applications’ (NCSA) Blue Waters supercomputer for use in 2020. These allocations range from 50,000 to 1,000,000 node-hours of compute time over one year, and altogether total more than 21 million node-hours (over 670 million core-hour equivalents), valued at over $13 million. The research pursuits of these teams are incredibly diverse, ranging anywhere from studies on the disassembly of the Hepatitis B virus capsid to simulating neutron stars and black holes. Blue Waters, one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, is capable of sustaining 1.3 quadrillion calculations every second and at peak speed can reach a rate of 13.3 petaflops (calculations per second). Its massive scale and balanced architecture help scientists and scholars alike tackle projects that could not be addressed with other computing systems. NCSA’s Blue Waters project provides University of Illinois faculty and staff a valuable resource to perform groundbreaking work in computational science and is integral to Illinois’ mission to foster discovery and innovation. Through the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) is able to fund Blue Waters operations for 2020. The system and the University’s robust HPC community presents a unique opportunity for the U of I faculty and researchers, with about 10 percent of the capacity of Blue Waters allocated to projects being done at the University through an increasingly competitive campuswide peer-review and the BW professor processes. FALL 2019 ILLINOIS ALLOCATIONS Aleksei Aksimentiev (Physics): Determining the structure and viscoelasticity of the cytoplasm in atomistic detail (600 KNHs)Narayana Aluru (Mechanical Engineering): Large-Scale Simulation of Complex, Multidisciplinary interfaces involving 1D and 2D Materials (435 KNHs)Mark Anastasio (Bioengineering): Safe and rapid functional brain imaging with transcranial photoacoustic tomography: Accelerating iterative image reconstruction algorithms using GPUs (210 KNHs)Huck Beng Chew (Aerospace Engineering): Exploiting Lattice Strain Moiré Effects to Control Plasma-Patterning of twisted 2D Atomic Sheets (180 KNHs)Liang Chen (Atmospheric Sciences): Impacts of Land Use on Climate and Extreme Events across Scales in North America Using Community Earth System Model (420 KNHs)Wendy Cho (Political Science, Statistics, Mathematics, Asian American Studies, College of Law): Parallel Hybrid Metaheuristics with Distributed Intensification and Diversification for Large-scale Optimization in Statistical Analysis (50 KNHs)Ahmed Elbanna (Civil and Environmental Engineering): Regional scale deterministic ground motion simulations from dynamic rupture models considering shallow crust nonlinearity and implications for tsunami generation (128 KNHs)Aida X El-Khadra (Physics): The anomalous magnetic moment of the muon: An improved ab-initio calculation of the hadronic vacuum polarization contribution (765 KNHs)Elif Ertekin (Mechanical Engineering): Accelerating Thermoelectric Materials Discovery via Dopability Predictions II: Descriptors of Dopability in Complex Semiconductors (595 KNHs)Marcelo Garcia (Earth Sciences): Bed Characteristics and Stratification effects in Turbulent Oscillatory Boundary Layers (895 KNHs)Martin Gruebele (Biophysics): Computational Modeling of the Hepatitis B Virus Capsid Disassembly (600 KNHs)Kaiyu Guan (Earth Sciences): Integrating multi-platform satellites, radiative transfer model, and land surface model to estimate near-real-time surface radiation component with high spatial (500m-2km) and temporal (5min) resolutions across the Continental United States (CONUS) (1,000 KNHs)Paul Hergenrother (Chemistry): Antibiotic Resistance Mechanism in Pseudomonas aeruginosa (750 KNHs)Eliu Huerta (Astronomy): Numerical simulations of neutron stars and black holes (690 KNHs)Iwona Jasiuk (Mechanical Engineering): Multiscale Modeling of Novel Metal-carbon Nanocomposites (50 KNHs)Seid Koric (NCSA): Evaluation of Massively Parallel Sparse Direct Solvers in Science and Engineering (170 KNHs)David Lange (Civil and Environmental Engineering): Optimization of Cellular Concrete for Impact Resistance Infrastructure: A Multiscale Analysis of ENergy Absorption Behavior of Brittle Cellular Materials (50 KNHs)Deborah Levin (Aerospace Engineering): Simulations of plasma-based flows using heterogeneous computational strategies (400 KNHs)Zhixia Li (Nuclear, Plasma and Radiological Engineering): Identification of durable hydrophobic inorganic materials using Molecular Dynamics Simulations driven by ab initio-based Neural Network Potentials (60 KNHs)Nancy Makri (Chemistry, Physics): Quantum-Classical Path Integral Simulation of Proton Translocation (120 KNHs)Moshe Matalon (Mechanical Engineering): Outwardly Expanding Premixed Flames in Open and Confined Turbulent Environments (180 KNHs)Felipe Menanteau (Astronomical Sciences): Assembling a Map of the Universe with Blue Waters: Shapes and mass distribution for the Dark Energy Survey (350 KNHs)Jeffery Moore (Beckman Institute, Chemistry): Molecular Mechanism of Precision Polymers as Novel Inhibitors of Beta-Amyloid Fibril Formation (690 KNHs)Jill Naiman (Astrophysics): The Black Hole Blue Waters Project (150 KNHs)Luke Olson (Computer Science): Increasing Locality in Sparse Solvers (50 KNHs)Jian Peng (Earth Sciences): Generating a 30m-resolution, daily, and cloud-/gap-free surface reflectance dataset for the Midwestern United States through fusing MODIS and Landsat for agricultural applications (648 KNHs)Taras Pogorelov (Chemistry): Sterol Extraction via Amphotericin: precision molecular changes drive kinetics (455 KNHs)Paul Ricker (Astronomical Sciences): Effects of Active Galaxy Feedback in Galaxy Clusters (640 KNHs)Andre Schleife (Materials Science and Engineering): Nonadiabatic electron-ion dynamics in nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamond (440 KNHs)Diwakar Shukla (Molecular Biosciences): Molecular Origin of Drug Selectivity in Human Cannabinoid Receptors (784 KNHs)Justin Sirignano (Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering): HPC Development of Physics-constrained Deep Learning Models for Turbulent Combustion (770 KNHs)Ryan Sriver (Atmospheric Sciences): Response in climate and weather extremes to increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide in the High-Resolution Community Earth System Model (CESM) (1,000 KNHs)Emad Tajkhorshid (Biophysics): Hybrid Quantum Mechanics / Molecular Mechanics Simulations of Proton Transport Through Membrane Embedded Carbon Nanotubes (706 KNHs)Dallas Trinkle (Materials Science and Engineering): Materials Modeling Optimization (240 KNHs)Albert Valocchi (Earth Sciences): Direct Numerical Simulation of Two-Phase FLow to improve Pore-Scale Models for Prediction of Transport and Storage in Natural Rocks (104 KNHs)Lucas Wagner (Materials Science and Engineering): Coarse-grained models for quantum description of many electrons (194 KNHs)Lara Waldrop (Astronomical Sciences): The Dynamic Hydrogen Exosphere of Earth: Simulating Space Weather Effects on Atmospheric Escape (87 KNHs)Zhuo Wang (Atmospheric Sciences): Interannual Prediction and Predictability of Atlantic Tropical Cyclones and the Role of Extratropical Processes (422 KNHs)Tandy Warnow (Computer Science): Developing TIPP2: High accuracy and scalable metagenomic sequence analysis (50 KNHs)Tandy Warnow (Computer Science): Statistical Phylogeny Estimation on Large Heterogeneous Datasets (100 KNHs)Matthew West (Mechanical Engineering): Simulating atmospheric particle composition for human health and climate impacts using the high-detail-particle-resolves aerosol model WRF-PartMC (130 KNHs) FALL 2019 ALLOCATIONS TO BLUE WATERS PROFESSORS Aleksei Aksimentiev (Physics), Daniel Bodony (Aerospace Engineering), David Ceperley (Physics), Bryan Clark (Physics), Larry Di Girolamo (Atmospheric Sciences), Paul Fischer (Computer Science, Mechanical Science and Engineering), Mattia Gazzola (Mechanical Science and Engineering), William Gropp (Computer Science), Kaiyu Guan (Earth Sciences), So Hirata (Chemistry), Kathryn Huff (Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological Engineering), Athol Kemball (Astronomy), Sonia Lasher-Trapp (Atmospheric Sciences), Andre Schleife (Materials Science and Engineering), Diwakar Shukla (Molecular Biosciences) and Jeffrey Trapp (Atmospheric Sciences). About Blue Waters Blue Waters is one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. Located at the University of Illinois, it can complete more than 1 quadrillion calculations per second on a sustained basis and more than 13 times that at peak speed. The peak speed is almost 3 million times faster than the average laptop. Blue Waters is supported by the National Science Foundation and the University of Illinois; the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) manages the Blue Waters project and provides expertise to help scientists and engineers take full advantage of the system for their research. The Blue Waters sustained-petascale computing project is supported by the National Science Foundation (awards OCI-0725070, ACI-0725070 and ACI-1238993) and the state of Illinois. ABOUT NCSA The National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign provides supercomputing and advanced digital resources for the nation’s science enterprise. At NCSA, University of Illinois faculty, staff, students and collaborators from around the globe use these resources to address research challenges for the benefit of science and society. NCSA has been advancing many of the world’s industry giants for over 35 years by bringing industry, researchers and students together to solve grand challenges at rapid speed and scale. Blue Waters is supported by the National Science Foundation through awards OCI-0725070 and ACI-1238993.