News Archive

Long-time NCSA staffer John Melchi is taking on new center-wide leadership responsibilities as Deputy Executive Director. This new leadership position combines his existing center-wide operational management duties (human resources, finance and budget, information technology services, facility management, and public affairs) with new center-wide responsibilities, including strategic planning, management system development, organization planning, and financial planning. … Continued

The National Digital Engineering and Manufacturing Consortium, a public-private partnership to support and enhance the use of modeling and simulation among America’s small and medium manufacturers, has received the 2012 HPCwire Editors’ Choice Award for Best HPC Collaboration between Government and Industry. NCSA’s Private Sector Program is a founding partner in NDEMC and shares in … Continued

by Scott Lathrop, Blue Waters Technical Program Manager for Education The Blue Waters project has been and continues to support activities that engage faculty and students across the country and help them in pursuing computational science and engineering research and education. Key partners with NCSA in these efforts include: Great Lakes Consortium for Computational Science … Continued

by Thom Dunning, Bill Kramer, and the Blue Waters team One year ago, the National Science Foundation approved NCSA’s request that the sustained petascale computing system being designed and deployed in the Blue Waters project be based on leading-edge technology from Cray, Inc. One year later, we want to bring you up to date on … Continued

From the time NCSA opened its doors, scientific visualization has played an important role. The visualization team of David Bock and Mark Van Moer provides technical expertise and assistance to computational scientists and researchers desiring to represent and analyze data generated by computational models. This facilitates the understanding of the simulated phenomena. Their expertise has … Continued

by Barbara Jewett Researchers used NCSA’s Forge to improve computational protein structure modeling. Proteins, those biological workhorse molecules that catalyze reactions, hold cells together, move muscles, and duplicate DNA, are nothing without their shape. In fact, that three-dimensional shape, called the protein structure, is the a major determinant of a protein’s function. “That’s why there’s … Continued

A new team at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications will tackle the challenges of extracting meaningful insights and innovation from science and engineering data in a wide variety of disciplines. The Data Cyberinfrastructure Directorate, led by NCSA Deputy Director and Chief Technology Officer Rob Pennington, unites NCSA projects, personnel, and capabilities focused on data-driven … Continued

Cray President and CEO Peter J. Ungaro recently spoke with Access’ Barbara Jewett about why the company Seymour Cray founded continues to be inimitable. Let’s start by talking about Blue Waters. Did you ever doubt you were doing the right thing in taking on the project? Not for a single second. We’re a company that … Continued

The full Blue Waters petascale computing system is now available in “friendly-user” mode to the National Science Foundation-approved science and engineering teams. These groups from across the country will use Blue Waters for challenging research in weather and climate, astrophysics, biomolecular systems, and other fields. Blue Waters is one of the largest computing systems in … Continued

William KramerDeputy Project Director for Blue WatersNCSA The TOP500 list was introduced over 20 years ago to assess supercomputer performance at a time when a major technical challenge was solving dense linear algebra problems on high-end computers. Now, most consider the list a marketing tool or an easy, if simplistic, way to impress politicians, funding … Continued

by Nicole Schiffer Almost everything relies heavily on computers, from the national power grid to physics research and healthcare. The new Software Assurance Marketplace (SWAMP), funded by a $23.6 million grant from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, aims to strengthen the security of the software used in these and similar endeavors that rely on … Continued