News Archive

The Blue Waters petascale computing project at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) have signed a collaborative agreement, bringing together the National Science Foundation’s two largest cyberinfrastructure projects. Under the agreement, Blue Waters will participate as a Level 2 Service Provider in the XSEDE Service … Continued

NCSA, XSEDE and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center will present a free workshop on OpenACC GPU programming on Nov. 5. The workshop will include a hands-on component using NCSA’s Blue Waters supercomputer. OpenACC is the accepted standard using compiler directives to allow quick development of GPU capable codes using standard languages and compilers. It has been … Continued

Fifteen University of Illinois undergraduate students have been selected for 2013-2014 internships at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), while five students will continue projects they began last year. These talented undergraduates were selected through NCSA’s SPIN (Students Pushing Innovation) program. After an August open house at NCSA, interested students submitted proposals describing projects … Continued

The robust growth of wind energy means that big portions of land are being used for large wind farms. While research has shown that turbine power in wind farms is influenced by the upstream wake from other turbines (power can decrease 50% compared to free-standing turbines), little is known about how a large array of … Continued

by Barbara Jewett NCSA experts assist a USC researcher analyzing video and film content and exploring how frequent exposure may influence our beliefs. As children, grownups frequently told us “don’t believe everything you hear.” This was secret code, reminding us to always sift what we’d heard through our brains’ filters of knowledge and personal experience … Continued

by Shaowen Wang Spatially heterogeneous and multi-scale changes across the globe, such as population growth, climate change, competing land uses, and accelerated resource and environmental degradation, have created grand challenges ranging from energy and environmental sustainability to health and wellness. To tackle these challenges, which exhibit tremendous geographical and spatial complexity, requires the consideration of … Continued

by Nicole Gaynor Researchers use Blue Waters to make satellites more efficient and effective. We rely on global satellite service for communications, navigation, and environmental monitoring, but have you ever thought about how satellites stay in orbit? Over time outside forces push and pull a satellite away from its original path. Scientists try to put … Continued

by Trish Barker Soon our devices will depend on transistors that are a few atoms wide. A tool developed by the Nanoelectronic Modeling Group will help design them. If you think nano-devices are the stuff of science fiction or the distant future, think again. “If you have an iPhone or other smartphone, you already have … Continued

Kenton McHenry, one of the leaders of NCSA’s Image and Spatial Data Analysis Division, tells Access’ Barbara Jewett about a project benefitting everyone. What is Brown Dog? Brown Dog is an effort to deal with large, uncurated collections of data. Uncurated in that there’s no metadata associated with it. Sometimes there’s not much structure at … Continued

Just as an instrument that’s out of tune assaults our eardrums, research tools that are out of whack create much unpleasantness for a researcher. But the talented experts of NCSA’s Advanced Application Support (AAS) group assist researchers in achieving the proper output.

As part of the Blue Water project, up to 1 percent (or 1.8 million node-hours) per year of the system’s computational capacity is available for educational uses, including semester-long courses, workshops, and institutes. These Education Allocations are intended to broaden the impact of Blue Waters and contribute to the development of a national workforce with … Continued

The National Science Foundation has awarded a three-year, $3.4 million dollar grant to cybersecurity experts at the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. They will provide training and technology for deploying the Bro network security monitor at NSF-funded sites of all … Continued

On Oct. 15, NCSA invites everyone to participate in Petascale Day, a celebration of big computing and big data. “Petascale” refers to computing and data in the quadrillions, like the more than 13 quadrillion calculations the Blue Waters supercomputer can perform every second and the quadrillions of bytes of data the center can store. Everyone … Continued