News Archive

by Elizabeth Murray The power of Blue Waters is revolutionizing the field of space physics. The sun is the key to life-sustaining functions here on Earth. It provides energy for photosynthesis and serves as a driving force behind climate and weather patterns, among other things. This star is both literally and figuratively the center of … Continued

Colleen BushellSPIN Project ManagerNCSA NCSA’s pilot program, SPIN: Students Pushing INnovation, concluded in May with seven of the undergraduate students presenting the results of their semester-long fellowships. These diverse students successfully demonstrated that they could bring unique concepts to fruition when given the freedom to pursue their own ideas, combined with coaching from experienced NCSA … Continued

One way to reduce the consumption of liquid fossil fuels is to improve combustion efficiency. Such improvements would mean engines like those in gasoline and diesel powered vehicles would use less fuel to achieve the same outcome. However, this requires a better understanding of the complex physical processes involved in the spray combustion of liquid … Continued

Whether the category is staff, grants or supercomputing power, numbers tell the story of NCSA’s scope and impact. See how the National Center for Supercomputing Applications breaks down by the numbers. One-third of the Fortune 50 have worked with NCSA through more than $75 million in research partnerships. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign ranked … Continued

The Virtual School of Computational Science and Engineering (VSCSE) will offer two hands-on courses for graduate students this summer: Petascale Programming Environments and Tools (July 12-15) Proven Algorithmic Techniques for Manycore Processors (August 15-19) These courses will be delivered to a number of sites nationwide—including the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of … Continued

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has awarded access to the Blue Waters supercomputer—which is capable of performing quadrillions of calculations every second and of working with quadrillions of bytes of data—to 22 campus research teams from a wide range of disciplines. The computing and data capabilities of Blue Waters, which is operated by the … Continued

A massive 380 petabyte High Performance Storage System (HPSS)—the world’s largest automated near-line data repository for open science—is now in full service production as part of the Blue Waters project at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The HPSS environment consists of multiple automated tape libraries, dozens … Continued

by Trish Barker Using supercomputing resources provided by the National Science Foundation’s Blue Waters and XSEDE projects and the Department of Energy’s INCITE program, a team of researchers has performed the most precise calculation to date of a key quantity in high-energy physics, a field that asks fundamental questions about the nature of matter and … Continued

The two winners of the 2012 Graduate Student Award in Computational Physical Chemistry, given by the American Chemical Society’s Theoretical Subdivision, will receive 100,000 service units (3,125 node hours) on the Blue Waters supercomputer to accelerate their research. Scott Carmichael, a graduate student in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of California Santa … Continued

by Elizabeth Murray Solving their code’s I/O problems leads to faster performance and a new step forward in seismological research for University of Wyoming researchers. Blue Waters could be the key to understanding the connections between Earth’s deep structure and seismic energy. Often one of the major bottlenecks of this sort of research is the … Continued

NCSA will host a free symposium May 21-22 at which representatives from science teams using the Blue Waters supercomputer will share methods and results in areas including GPUs, improving scalability, and new algorithms. The Blue Waters Symposium focuses on the work of research groups from a wide range of fields—including weather and climate, chemistry, earthquake … Continued