News Archive

by Nicole Gaynor The symposium, held May 13-15 in Champaign, Ill., gathered many of the country’s leading supercomputer users to share what they have learned using Blue Waters and discuss the future of supercomputing. On May 13, 2014, Blue Waters supercomputer users and many of the NCSA staff who support their work converged in Champaign, … Continued

NCSA is helping science and engineering build stronger cybersecurity with online tutorials through the CTSC. The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) security team has produced “Building a Cybersecurity Program”—a 19-part online video tutorial series—as part of the Center for Trustworthy Scientific Cyberinfrastructure’s (CTSC) continuing effort to improve the cybersecurity of NSF-funded computational science and … Continued

by Nicole Gaynor Blue Waters is helping Vijay Pande’s research group at Stanford tackle serious diseases at the molecular level. Can cloud computing replace supercomputers like Blue Waters in the future? No, says Vijay Pande, director of the biophysics program at Stanford University. Both are critical to his study of serious diseases like Alzheimer’s and … Continued

NCSA is one of several sites across the country offering students the opportunity to learn hybrid computing techniques through a four-day HPC Bootcamp, sponsored by the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE). The June 24-27 workshop will include MPI, OpenMP, OpenACC, and accelerators and will conclude with a contest challenging students to apply their … Continued

Tonight, as the sun sinks below the horizon, the world’s most powerful digital camera will once again turn its gleaming eye skyward. For hundreds of nights over the next four years, the images from this camera will be transmitted directly to NCSA as a team of astronomers and physicists from around the globe try to … Continued

Seid Koric, a senior computational resources coordinator with NCSA’s Private Sector Program, says he experienced “an a-ha moment” recently when evaluating the performance of the Abaqus/Standard implicit finite element software on the GPU nodes of the center’s Blue Waters supercomputer. The results convinced him that “GPU computing has a future for commercial codes.” Because many … Continued

Data-driven visualizations created by NCSA’s Advanced Visualization Laboratory (AVL) will be featured in the Adler Planetarium’s new live show “Destination Solar System.” Opening May 16, the show takes visitors on a tour “from sizzling solar flares on the Sun to liquid methane lakes on Saturn’s moon.” “We didn’t just want to visit the planets, we … Continued

The Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) and the Private Sector Program at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) have collaborated to scale BSC’s Alya multi-physics code to a previously unprecedented 100,000 cores of NCSA’s Blue Waters supercomputer, simulating complex engineering problems such as airflow in the human body, contraction of the heart, and combustion in … Continued

On April 28 the four co-chairs of the House Science and National Labs Caucus—Reps. Randy Hultgren, Chaka Fattah, Ben Ray Luján, and Alan Nunnelee—sponsored a briefing on the value of federal investment in high-performance computing. The event was held in conjunction with the one-year anniversary of NCSA’s Blue Waters supercomputer, a petascale powerhouse capable of … Continued

By Elizabeth MurrayNormal procedure for running a job on Blue Waters goes something like this: compile the code; create an executable; write a submission script; submit the script; and the scheduler runs the script. The script specifies how many nodes to run on, and the scheduler allocates resources on the machine. Once the job is … Continued

Six outstanding computational science PhD students from across the country have been selected to receive the first Blue Waters Graduate Fellowships, which provide graduate students in diverse fields with substantial support and the opportunity to leverage the petascale power of NCSA’s Blue Waters supercomputer to advance their research. Over three years this fellowship program will … Continued

by Barbara Jewett Major corporate computer breaches put computer security in the public eye, only for security thoughts to wane until the next big breach. For NCSA’s cybersecurity team, keeping systems safe and fending off attacks is an on-going job. News reports of mega-retailers or banks having their computer systems surreptitiously hacked begs the question: … Continued

by Barbara Jewett An algorithm developed by University of Arkansas engineers aids both computational scientists and experimentalists exploring the atomic scale structure of materials. The structure of a material influences every property of that material, says engineering professor Douglas Spearot. And it is the structural details at the atomic level that can have the greatest … Continued

The emerging Digital Research and Education in Arts Media Institute, known as eDream, is celebrating its fifth anniversary. I’m proud to say the institute’s overarching mission of fostering creativity by enabling unique trans-disciplinary connections has yielded some impressive results. One important milestone for eDream is the establishment of the eDream Fiddler Innovation Endowment dedicated to … Continued