News Archive

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) contributed new versions of its famous data-driven visualizations of how tornadoes form—already seen by millions in PBS NOVA’s Hunt for the Supertwister—to the new permanent exhibit, Science Storms at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry (MSI). The exhibit reveals the extraordinary science behind some of nature’s most powerful … Continued

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) will host a free workshop on the use of NWChem on high-performance computing systems Dec. 1-2, 2010, in Urbana, Illinois. NWChem is a computational chemistry package developed and maintained by the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Washington State. It can be used … Continued

Dozens of middle- and high-school students from across Illinois and around the nation will have the opportunity to tackle the challenges of computational modeling at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) as they compete in the Illinois Science Olympiad State Finals Competition on April 10 and the Science Olympiad National Tournament May 21-22. In … Continued

Seats are filling quickly for the Building the Data Center of the Future 2nd Biennial Workshop: HPC Data Centers, June 23-24, 2010, at the I-Hotel and Conference Center in Champaign, Illinois. Don’t miss out—reserve your seat now for this free workshop. Space is limited and advance registration is required. Keynote speakers Ed Seminaro, chief architect … Continued

With Blue Waters, atmospheric scientists believe they’ll be able to gain important insights into the formation of dangerous twisters, leading to earlier and more accurate warnings. In many ways, tornadoes remain a mystery. While their powerful winds can leave broad swaths of devastation—damaged and destroyed homes and businesses, injuries and fatalities—twisters are a challenge for … Continued

The University of Illinois’ National Petascale Computing Facility (NPCF) has reached substantial completion and will be ready for operations June 1. “We were able to complete this state-of-the-art facility ahead of schedule and under budget,” said John Melchi, who led the NPCF project as the head of the Administration Directorate of the National Center for … Continued

The MyProxy project is celebrating its 10-year anniversary this April. The first version of the MyProxy credential management software was created at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) in April 2000. Over the past 10 years, the project has released more than 50 versions of the MyProxy software containing contributions from developers around the … Continued

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) has selected Linux as the operating system for the multi-petaflop IBM POWER7-based Blue Waters supercomputer that will come online in 2011. Staff at NCSA and IBM evaluated both the open-source Linux and IBM’s AIX as potential operating systems for Blue Waters, extensively testing both on identical hardware at … Continued

Blue Waters is expected to be the most powerful supercomputer in the world for open scientific research when it comes online at Illinois in 2011. Scientists and engineers who are eager to tap this sustained-petaflop powerhouse for breakthrough research are already working closely with the Blue Waters project team to prepare their codes. The National … Continued

High-resolution 3D visualizations of galaxies, nebulae and newborn stars created at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications take viewers on an unprecedented voyage of discovery into the wonders of the universe in Hubble 3D, a 43-minute IMAX® 3D documentary narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio. The film offers an inspiring and unique look into the Hubble Space … Continued

The best paper presented at the Symposium on Chemical Computations on General-Purpose Graphics Processing Units, to be held in conjunction with the 240th American Chemical Society National Meeting in Boston, Aug. 22-26, will be rewarded with an NVIDIA Tesla C2050 GPU computing processor courtesy of NVIDIA. Submissions of abstracts on the use of GP-GPUs in … Continued

The Blue Waters Undergraduate Petascale Education Program is offering 17 undergraduate research internships for 2010-2011. Students will be paired with members of an existing research or educational team that is conducting petascale computing research. The program will provide students with computational thinking skills and the knowledge they need to advance scientific computing throughout their careers. … Continued

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) will soon deploy a new highly parallel shared memory supercomputer, called Ember. With a peak performance of 16 teraflops, Ember doubles the performance of its predecessor, the five-year-old Cobalt system. Ember will be available to researchers through the National Science Foundation’s TeraGrid until that program concludes in March … Continued

Victor Jongeneel is joining the University of Illinois as a senior research scientist at both the Institute for Genomic Biology (IGB) and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). Jongeneel will be developing a biomedical informatics program that brings together resources and expertise at both research centers and across the Illinois campus and will engage … Continued

By John McDermott For the second time in two years, NCSA research programmer Alan Craig and Kalev Leetaru, a former NCSA staffer, have been awarded a patent. This time, the duo’s collaboration resulted in a user-friendly database program designed for academic communities unfamiliar with computer coding. Inspiration for the technology came in 2004 when Illinois … Continued

The National Science Foundation is currently soliciting proposals from researchers who are interested in tackling challenging science and engineering problems using Blue Waters, a sustained petascale supercomputer that will come online in 2011 at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Time on Blue Waters will be awarded through the National Science Foundation’s Petascale Computing Resource … Continued