News Archive

Caterpillar Inc. today announced it will collaborate with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to conduct high-performance computing (HPC) projects focused on more realistic simulations that can lead to improved product designs. Through the expanded partnership, NCSA will host Caterpillar’s simulation research on iForge supercomputer over a … Continued

The XSEDE15 conference—to be held July 26-30 in St. Louis—will provide a full day of hands-on tutorials, spanning topics from secure coding practices and CUDA programming to scientific visualization and “supercomputing in plain English.” Participation in the tutorials is just $125 when you register by June 25—just $80 for students. Conference registration is $500 through … Continued

NCSA’s Private Sector Program and Intel are offering two free training classes on parallel programming using the Intel® Xeon Phi™ coprocessors. These workshops provide the foundation needed for software developers to modernize their codes to extract more of the parallel compute performance potential found in both Intel® Xeon® processors and Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors. The … Continued

Seventeen U of I research teams from a wide range of disciplines have been awarded computational and data resources on the sustained-petascale Blue Waters supercomputer at NCSA. “These diverse projects highlight the breadth of computational research at the University of Illinois,” said Athol Kemball, associate professor of Astronomy and chair of the Illinois allocation review … Continued

The University of Illinois’ Computational Science and Engineering program, which fosters and coordinates interdisciplinary, computationally oriented research and education, is moving into the NCSA Building this July. This move will facilitate greater collaboration between CSE and NCSA, particularly in the areas of research and training. “Our Computational Science and Engineering program and NCSA share so … Continued

As part of the Blue Waters project, NCSA is substantially upgrading its networking capacity, giving researchers across the country the ability to move data more quickly than ever before. The center will have four 100-gigabit research connections when the work is completed in summer 2015: Internet2, which connects to 260 universities, 65 government agencies, 40 … Continued

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) recently set a new world record by scaling CD-adapco’s flagship simulation tool STAR-CCM+® to 102,000 cores on the Blue Waters supercomputer. STAR-CCM+ is a comprehensive multidisciplinary engineering simulation tool used across many industries to stimulate innovation and lower product development costs. CD-adapco joined with NCSA’s Private Sector Program … Continued

31 undergraduate students are starting (or continuing) internships at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) this summer. They are pursuing research and development projects with NCSA staff and affiliated U of I faculty members. Mingzhe Zhao is working with mentor Scott Althaus (Political Science/Cline Center for Democracy) on Dynamic Monitoring and Runtime Configuration of … Continued

The 2015 Blue Waters Symposium, held May 10-13 at Oregon’s beautiful Sunriver Resort, brought together leaders in petascale computational science and engineering to share successes and methods. Around 130 attendees, many of whom were Blue Waters users and the NCSA staff who support their work, enjoyed presentations on computational advances in a range of research … Continued

NCSA’s Private Sector Program (PSP) has a unique opportunity to work with non-academic codes, impact economic development, and make more complex simulations happen for industry partners, says Merle Giles, PSP director. High-performance computing (HPC) has become a core strategic technology enabling enhanced insight into product performance and improving the productivity by considering more design variants. … Continued

by Nicole Gaynor Monte Carlo methods are a common approach to large computational problems. Lucas Wagner and Robert Sugar both use this method to study different aspects of physics on Blue Waters. What do superconductors and the intergalactic medium have in common? Scientists study both on Blue Waters using something called Monte Carlo methods. Monte … Continued

by Barbara Jewett The CyberGIS Center relies on Hadoop for social media analytics. When people at the CyberGIS Center for Advanced Digital and Spatial Studies say they are going to Hadoop or YARN, they’re not breaking into a new dance step or pulling out the knitting needles. They’re actually working. Very efficiently. Thanks to the … Continued

by Barbara Jewett NCSA’s Innovative Systems Laboratory explores new ways advances in computing can aid scientific discovery. “Oh, this will be good!” That’s the lure of the new, says NCSA Deputy Director Rob Pennington, especially when it comes to computer architectures. But then, he notes, you have to check it out. It was that “checking … Continued