News Archive

p>by Susan McKenna A researcher compiles data on the desktop for days. A biologist struggles to analyze huge amounts of data. An engineering team runs a project on the local cluster but needs to find a more powerful solution. These researchers, scientists, and engineers need help to move beyond the technology problems so they can … Continued

Victor Jongeneel leads the bioinformatics efforts of NCSA and the University of Illinois. He recently spoke with Access’ Barbara Jewett about what bioinformatics is—and is not. Q. When we say bioinformatics, what exactly are we talking about? A. We’re talking about something’s that not really a science. Bioinformatics is, in a very broad sense, the … Continued

As the first year of the XSEDE project draws to a close, I have been reflecting on the myriad activities that have gone on in starting up the project. I’ve also been looking to the year ahead and our exciting plans going forward. In no small part, this has been prompted by our first major … Continued

Have you ever wondered how your computer, internet phone service, laptop, smartphone, or gaming machine gets to the resources it needs to operate and provide you service? Or how NCSA supercomputers transfer data to sites thousands of miles away? It’s the network! What would it be like to come to work and not have a … Continued

Visualization has been an integral part of NCSA since its beginning. That tradition continues with the Blue Waters project. While the early visualization work is mostly concerned with testing software functionality and performance, says Dave Semeraro, Blue Waters visualization team leader, it is providing tantalizing glimpses of the science. As Petascale Computing Resource Allocations (PRAC) … Continued

“Petascale” refers to computing and data in the quadrillions, like the more than 11 quadrillion calculations Blue Waters will be able to perform and the more than 300 quadrillion bytes that NCSA’s data storage system can handle. One quadrillion looks like this: 1,000,000,000,000,000, or in scientific notation, 1015. That inspired us to declare 10.15.12 to … Continued

Qualified candidates are invited to apply for postdoctoral and graduate research fellowships at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Fellows will draw upon the expertise and facilities of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) to apply high-performance and/or data-intensive computational science and technology to research related to the activities of the Cyprus Institute (CyI) … Continued

The award for Best GPU Paper at the 2012 Symposium on Application Accelerators in High-Performance Computing went to “Power Aware Computing on GPUs” by Kiran Kasichayanula, Dan Terpstra, Piotr Luszczek, Stan Tomov, Shirley Moore and Gregory Peterson. The winners received an NVIDIA Tesla C2075 GPU computing processor, courtesy of NVIDIA. Congratulations!

iForge, the high-performance computing system designed for NCSA’s industry partners, is being upgraded with new processors and increased capacity. 128 dual-socket Intel blades (Dell PowerEdge M620) replace the previous 116 dual-socket Intel blades (Dell PowerEdge M610), three quad-socket Intel blades (Dell PowerEdge M910), and four quad-socket AMD servers (Dell PowerEdge C6145). Two quad-socket AMD nodes … Continued

by Nicole Schiffer Researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign used NCSA’s Ember to simulate the elastic-plastic transition, or the change from reversible to irreversible deformation, of a 1 million-grain cube of grade-316 steel under pure shear stress. It is thought to be the largest nonlinear simulation in which each grain has different material … Continued