News Archive

It’s not Blue Waters yet, but it’s an important part of the Blue Waters project. On December 1, Cray delivered a single cabinet of compute nodes. The full Blue Waters system will have more than 265, a combination of Cray XE6 and XK6 technology. Experts from NCSA and Cray will use this supercomputer to test … Continued

With the announcement of a new Blue Waters petascale system that includes a considerable amount of GPU capability, it is clear GPUs are the future of supercomputing. Access magazine’s Barbara Jewett recently sat down with Wen-mei Hwu, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois, a co-principal investigator on the Blue … Continued

NCSA has created an iPhone/iPad game! Flops Fever was created by University of Illinois students Ari Morgan and Harry Hsiao and can be downloaded free from the Apple app store! An Android version of the game will be coming soon. Scientists and engineers keep supercomputers very busy simulating severe storms, galaxies, molecules, and more. Scheduling … Continued

ContactNCSA media:Bill Bell217.265.5102jbell@ncsa.illinois.edu Cray media:Nick Davis206.701.2123nickd@cray.com SEATTLE, WA — The University of Illinois’ National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) has finalized a contract with Cray Inc. (Nasdaq: CRAY), to provide the supercomputer for the National Science Foundation’s Blue Waters project. This new Cray supercomputer will support significant research advances in a broad range of science … Continued

A Parallel Tools Platform user group meeting will be held in conjunction with SC11. The meeting will be 5:30 to 7 p.m. Nov. 16 in the Aspen Room at the Sheraton Seattle Hotel, 1400 6th Ave., Seattle. This event is supported by a Software Infrastructure for Sustained Innovation grant from the National Science Foundation and … Continued

James J. Barlow, the head of Security Operations and Incident Response at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), will give an Information Trust Institute Trust & Security Seminar on “Tracking a Hacker: The Long Tail of Incident Response” at 4 p.m. Oct. 19 in Room 3405 at the University of Illinois’ Siebel Center for … Continued

The National Science Foundation has awarded a grant of $7.7 million over five years to the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to operate a sophisticated data management pipeline for the Dark Energy Survey, a collaborative astronomy project focusing on uncovering the nature of dark energy. Beginning in … Continued

Forge—a 153 teraflop supercomputer that combines both CPUs and general-purpose graphics-processing units (GPUs)—is now available at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications for use by scientists and engineers across the country. Multiple scientific codes have been adapted for GPU computing, enabling a rapidly diversifying range of disciplinary research, including biomolecular simulations, lattice quantum chromodynamics, computational … Continued

After spending decades as a particle physicist, the University of Illinois’ Jon Thaler now spends the bulk of his time on two massive astronomy projects that NCSA is also heavily involved in—the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope and the Dark Energy Survey. These instruments will start scanning the night sky in the coming years, allowing a … Continued

What does a monster hurricane look like as it develops? NCSA’s Advanced Visualization Laboratory (AVL) will show you. The AVL team created a dramatic new visualization of 2005’s devastating Hurricane Katrina. A hurricane research team at the Earth System Laboratory at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, led by Wei Wang, … Continued

by Trish Barker A team of Illinois chemists discovers that a previously unknown type of bond is responsible for the stability of molecules with more bonds than the Octet Rule predicts. “How atoms bond is about as fundamental as it gets for chemistry,” says Illinois chemistry graduate student Jeff Leiding. Given that truism, you might … Continued

by Barbara Jewett Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago rely on NCSA resources to develop nanocarriers that deliver drugs right to the affected area. Like a marksman hitting the bull’s eye, targeted drug delivery puts medicine right where it is needed. For cancer patients, this could reduce the side effects associated with treatment … Continued