News Archive

Chris Malone and Andy Nonaka explains how their UC Santa Cruz/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory team is using the Blue Waters Early Science System to study how carbon and oxygen burn to iron during the initial stages of thermonuclear runaway as a white dwarf goes supernova. What research are you conducting on the Blue Waters Early … Continued

NCSA has deployed the quantum chemistry software TeraChem 1.50 on the center’s CPU-GPU cluster, Forge. TeraChem is designed to run on NVIDIA CUDA-enabled GPU architectures and is the fastest GPU-accelerated computational chemistry software available. On Forge, the distribution is at /usr/apps/chemistry/Terachem, with instructions for running in batch and interactive at /usr/apps/chemistry/Terachem/README.txt and a user guide … Continued

Homayoun Karimabadi from the University of California-San Diego explains how his team is using the Blue Waters Early Science System to investigate magnetic reconnection, which triggers storms on the sun and allows the sun’s radiation to enter Earth’s magnetosphere. You’re using the Early Science System to model magnetic reconnection. Can you explain why this is … Continued

On Sept. 28, 2012, NCSA’s Dell/NVIDIA cluster, Forge, will be decommissioned due to lack of ongoing support. Support for Forge has come primarily from the National Science Foundation, but there are also allocations supported by the University of Illinois, NCSA’s Private Sector Program, and the NCSA Director’s Office. The batch queues on Forge will be … Continued

There will be a free workshop on the basics of Abaqus, a suite of software applications for finite element analysis and computer-aided engineering from Dassault Systems, this Friday, April 13 from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. CST in Room 1040 at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (1205 W. Clark St., Urbana, IL). Space in … Continued

With the first portion of the Blue Waters petascale supercomputer now being used by six science teams, the Blue Waters visualization team is using scalable visualization software to produce some of the first science images from the Blue Waters project. NCSA staff members are performing application tests to ascertain Blue Waters’ system and application performance. … Continued

by Trish Barker NCSA is helping humanities and social science scholars analyze troves of data about worlds both real and virtual, shedding light on human behavior. Across the spectrum, data has gotten BIG. “If you look at the trend, databases are getting bigger and bigger,” says NCSA database architect Dora Cai. While 50 gigabytes would … Continued

Six research teams have begun using the first phase of the Blue Waters sustained-petascale supercomputer to study some of the most challenging problems in science and engineering, from supernovae to climate change to the molecular mechanism of HIV infection. The Blue Waters Early Science System, which is made up of 48 Cray XE6 cabinets, represents … Continued

Beginning in January 2013, teams will compete to accurately sequence the genomes of 100 healthy centenarians within 30 days for less than $1,000 per genome. A $10 million prize will be either awarded to a single winner or divided among successful teams. The Archon Genomics X PRIZE presented by Medco is intended to inspire breakthroughs … Continued

NCSA’s Torsten Hoefler, who leads application and system performance modeling and simulation efforts for the Blue Waters project, has been selected as the recipient of the 2012 SIAG/Supercomputing Junior Scientist Prize. The award honors distinguished contributions in the field of algorithms research and development for parallel scientific and engineering computing. Hoefler’s research revolves around performance-centric … Continued

Adaptive Computing, manager of some of the world’s largest supercomputing systems and an expert in high-performance computing (HPC) workload management, is the latest company to join NCSA’s Private Sector Program, which puts the center’s expertise to work on some of the toughest challenges faced by industry. “Adaptive Computing is taking advantage of a new partnership … Continued