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Nine research teams receive GLCPC Allocations on Blue Waters


The Great Lakes Consortium for Petascale Computation (GLCPC) allocates a portion of the Blue Waters supercomputer located at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The GLCPC awards peer-reviewed allocations on the Blue Waters supercomputer to faculty and research groups from member institutions.

The GLCPC member institutions include universities and colleges, national laboratories, the Southeastern Universities Research Association, educational foundations, and K-12 school districts who are developing educational and workforce development programs to help realize the full potential of petascale computing.

Through a robust allocation process, nine research teams have been awarded a total of 4.3 million node hours (over 137 million core-hour equivalents) on Blue Waters for the 2018-2019 timeframe. These projects cover a range of science fields, including the investigation of the HIV-1 infection cycle, simulating near-ground hazards during thunderstorms, and modeling the behavior of black holes.

Through Blue Waters allocations, GLCPC member institutions are given an unprecedented opportunity to expand computation, data and visualization-intensive research using the Blue Waters system, one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world.

The 2018-2019 investigators, project titles and institutions are as follows:

  • Claude-Andre Faucher-Giguere, Northwestern University, Simulating the Co-Evolution of Massive Galaxies and their Black Holes
  • Mahmoud Moradi, University of Arkansas, Thermodynamic Characterization of Conformational Landscape in Proton-Coupled Oligopeptide Transporters
  • Marcos Sotomayor and Brandon Neel, Ohio State University, Molecular Dynamics Simulations of Cellular Adhesion Junctions
  • Juan Perilla and Tyler Reddy, University of Delaware, Revealing the molecular mechanisms of the early and late stages of the HIV-1 infection cycle through the computational microscope.
  • Julian Krolik and John Hawley, University of Virginia, Tilted Disks Around Black Holes: Elucidating the Alignment Mechanism
  • Peter Kasson and Michael Irrgang, University of Virginia, Using fusion peptide mutations to explain influenza viral fusion mechanisms
  • Leigh Orf and Eric Savory, University of Wisconsin, Near-ground hazards associated with downburst-producing thunderstorms
  • Yongyang Cai, William Brock, Thomas Hertel and Kenneth Judd, Ohio State University, Policy Responses to Climate Change in a Dynamic Stochastic Economy
  • Jennifer Corcoran, Brian Huberty, Keith Pelletier, Joseph Knight, James Klassen, Laura Borgeau-Chavez, University of Minnesota, Image Processing to Build a Multi-Temporal Vegetation Elevation Ecosystem Model (MTVEEM)

About NCSA

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at 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 advanced digital resources to address research grand challenges for the benefit of science and society. NCSA has been advancing one third of the Fortune 50® for more than 30 years by bringing industry, researchers, and students together to solve grand challenges at rapid speed and scale.

About the Blue Waters Project

The Blue Waters petascale supercomputer is one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. Blue Waters uses hundreds of thousands of computational cores to achieve peak performance of more than 13 quadrillion calculations per second. With 1.5 petabytes of memory, Blue Waters has faster data storage than any other open system in the world. Scientists and engineers across the country use the computing and data power of Blue Waters to tackle a wide range of interdisciplinary challenges. Recent advances that were not possible without these resources include computationally designing the rst set of antibody prototypes to detect the Ebola virus, simulating the HIV capsid, visualizing the formation of the first galaxies and exploding stars, and understanding how the layout of a city can impact supercell thunderstorms.

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