News Archive

by Nicole Schiffer Brandon Carrel, who worked with NCSA’s Network Engineering group this past spring as a high school student, plans to start a computer science degree this fall at the University of Illinois and will continue working with NCSA as an undergraduate intern. “It was a perfect environment for me and it introduced me … Continued

Two data-driven visualizations created by NCSA’s Advanced Visualization Laboratory for the immersive digital full-dome production “Dynamic Earth” will be shown as part of the SIGGRAPH 2012 Computer Animation Festival this August in Los Angeles. “Volcano Sapas Mons on Venus” takes viewers across the blighted landscape of Earth’s neighbor to the Sapas Mons crater, where twin … Continued

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI) will undertake collaborative research and development projects through a newly formed joint laboratory. An agreement forming the KISTI-NCSA Joint Lab was signed in Korea in May. The joint venture will focus on developing technology related to supercomputing, potentially … Continued

Every five years NCSA undertakes the development of a new strategic plan. The strategic planning process gives NCSA leadership and staff an opportunity to critically examine our activities during the past five years as well as look forward to where research, education and technology are going in the next five years. We began the planning … Continued

The information age we live in exists on top of a large amount of digital data. Thanks to the web we have access to this data. Thanks to search engines that index this data we can efficiently search it. What many may not realize is that this is only a fraction of the data that … Continued

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) is adding 380 petabytes of automated, near-line storage capacity for data produced by scientists and engineers using the sustained petascale Blue Waters supercomputer and to support other projects. The center plans to eventually scale this dynamic, high-performance storage system to more than half an exabyte (>500 petabytes). “NCSA … Continued

by Barbara Jewett NCSA and XSEDE aid an Indiana University researcher studying the migration of massive planets in protoplanetary disks. Understanding how planets shift is one of the first steps in the quest to discover other life in the universe. Looking for planets similar to Earth is “the Holy Grail of planetary and extrasolar planetary … Continued

Alan Blatecky, head of the National Science Foundation’s Office of Cyberinfrastructure, recently chatted with Access’ Barbara Jewett about the new visions at OCI and NSF. The Advanced Computing Infrastructure plan has five strategies. Is there one that you feel is more important or more urgent to address than the others? We carefully selected those five. … Continued

by J. William Bell With computing resources from XSEDE, engineers at Ohio University explore ammonia as a source of hydrogen for tomorrow’s fuel cells. For the fuel cell industry, ammonia has all kinds of things going for it. It’s abundant—the U.S. Geological Survey reports that more than 130 million metric tons were produced worldwide in … Continued

Four additional research teams have begun using the first phase of the Blue Waters sustained-petascale supercomputer to tackle challenging problems in science and engineering. They join six research groups that began using the system in March. The Blue Waters Early Science System, which is made up of 48 Cray XE6 cabinets, represents about 15 percent … Continued

NCSA will host two courses offered by the Virtual School of Computational Science and Engineering (VSCSE) this summer: Programming Heterogeneous Parallel Computing Systems, July 10-13 Proven Algorithmic Techniques for Many-core Processors, Aug. 13-17 These courses will be delivered to a number of sites nationwide using high-definition videoconferencing technologies, allowing students to participate at a number … Continued

by Barbara Jewett NCSA’s GPU machines allow researchers to improve the fluid dynamics codes used for rotorcraft design. There’s an old joke that has a flight instructor telling his student takeoff is easy, it’s landing that’s hard. Helicopter and tiltrotor pilots know that landing is even more difficult if you’re battling the wakes generated by … Continued

by Trish Barker For several years, the University of Illinois and the Cyprus Institute have been partners in an effort to establish a supercomputing center, and other expanded digital research capabilities, in the Eastern Mediterranean. Many of the diverse research activities encompassed by this collaboration are now bearing fruit for both partners. High-performance computing High-performance … Continued