News Archive

The U.S. Department of Energy has announced the projects that will receive 1.7 billion processor hours of supercomputing time through its Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program. Among the recipients are many researchers with ties to NCSA, including: NCSA staffer Brett Bode, the software development manager for the Blue Waters … Continued

NCSA staff, Blue Waters collaborators, and Blue Waters undergraduate interns all took home awards from the SC10 conference. Torsten Hoefler, who leads performance modeling and simulation efforts for the Blue Waters sustained-petaflop supercomputer project, earned the SC10 best technical paper award for “Characterizing the Influence of System Noise on Large-Scale Applications by Simulation.” This analysis … Continued

Leaders in human genomics, statistics, bioinformatics, and computational science came together in October to chart a map for the efficient use of high-performance computing in personalized medicine at a two-day workshop at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The workshop was co-sponsored by Illinois’ National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and Institute for Genomic Biology … Continued

by Allison Copenbarger With guidance from ECE professor Wen-mei Hwu, CS professor Bill Gropp, and cluster experts at NCSA, students got hands-on experience building their own supercomputer with NVIDIA graphics-processing units. When the Green500 list of energy-efficient supercomputers was posted Nov. 18, their system took third place overall and was named the greenest self-built cluster. … Continued

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) will soon employ IBM’s General Parallel File System (GPFS) across all its supercomputing platforms, including the upcoming sustained-petaflop Blue Waters system. GPFS is a high-performance, scalable clustered file system that provides reliable, concurrent high-speed file access to applications running on multiple nodes of clusters. In addition, GPFS greatly … Continued

The Joint Laboratory on Petascale Computing, a collaboration between the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and France’s INRIA computer science institute, will hold a workshop Nov. 22-24 at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications to explore research problems related to post-petascale and exascale supercomputers and to present results of their joint work. The workshop is … Continued

NCSA director Thom Dunning will lead a panel on Future Supercomputing Centers from 8:30 to 10 a.m. Nov. 19 in Room 384-385 during the SC10 conference. Panelists Tony Hey (Microsoft Corporation), William Gropp (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Thomas Lippert (Juelich Supercomputing Centre), Satoshi Matsuoka (Tokyo Institute of Technology), and Thomas Zacharia (Oak Ridge National … Continued

How did life on Earth begin? This tantalizing question forms the basis of Life: A Cosmic Story, which will premiere Nov. 6 at the Morrison Planetarium in San Francisco. This all-digital production, produced by the California Academy of Sciences, features a scene created by NCSA’s Advanced Visualization Laboratory. AVL visualized a seamless journey into the … Continued

by J. William Bell Undergraduate institute prepares students to integrate computer science, other research disciplines Integrated learning is the driving principle behind the Undergraduate Petascale Institute, which is training a new generation of scientists. They’ll be computational scientists who—from the very beginning of their education and careers—make computational simulation an integral part of their research … Continued

by Barbara Jewett A University of Kansas research team is using NCSA’s Abe to explore the energy of cosmic rays and a possible link to massive prehistoric extinction events. Fossils and cosmic rays appear to have nothing in common. But some researchers think one may be linked to the other. Radiation from cosmic rays—those energetic … Continued

Work by a University of Illinois team may help prevent deep sea oil pipeline disasters. Development of computational methods for modeling turbulent flows is considered a formidable challenge due to the plethora of associated spatial and temporal scales. Professor Arif Masud and graduate student Ramon Calderer from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at … Continued

by Trish Barker An online database that brings together farmers and customers is just one example of the power of geospatial Web tools. Across the nation, farmers are producing meat, eggs, fruits, and vegetables and are looking for buyers. Meanwhile, customers—from individuals to large retailers—are interested in buying these commodities, particularly from local or regional … Continued

by Barbara Jewett “Imagine the dark of deep space, interspersed with blazing and multi-hued stars. In the distance we see the brilliant colors of the nebula. I expect us to move toward the photo and see it in stunning detail, but we keep going, far beyond anything I believed possible. We get closer and closer. … Continued

by J. William Bell Computing codes improved as part of the National Science Foundation’s Petascale Computing Resource Allocations program will transform fundamental chemistry with wide-ranging impact. Water is wet, but the chemistry of water sounds like a dry subject, doesn’t it? Don’t we have water—ubiquitous, elemental water—figured out by now? Two hydrogens and an oxygen. … Continued