News Archive

Illinois faculty and researchers will have one final opportunity for allocations on the University of Illinois’ Blue Waters supercomputer, which is planned to end service in December 2019. Proposals for general allocations are due October 26, 2018. Details can be found at https://bluewaters.ncsa.illinois.edu/illinois-allocations. An information session will be held on October 17 at 10:00 a.m. … Continued

by Barbara Jewett When they learned of the publication of a collaborator’s research showing that long-term use of synthetic estrogen alters the microbiome in the guts of mice, the Visual Intelligence for Biology (VI-Bio) group took a brief moment to congratulate themselves on another successful attainment of their mission statement, then dove back into their … Continued

Ten research projects with connections to the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) have been nominated in this year’s edition of the HPCWire Readers’ Choice Awards. These awards present an opportunity for the high performance computing community to voice their praises for deserving and innovative research. Voting is open now. Dive into descriptions and stories … Continued

Thanks to a new simulation from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Goddard Space Flight Center and the Blue Waters supercomputer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), we now have a pretty good idea what it looks like when two black holes collide. Manuela Campanelli, director of the Center for Computational Relativity … Continued

by Barbara Jewett Scientists have long known that double-stranded DNA can be unwound into single-stranded DNA by molecular motor proteins called helicases, just like pulling a zipper. But researchers at the University of Illinois have discovered that the same machinery, after changing its shape, can also put the unwound DNA back together into double-stranded DNA. … Continued

The Dark Energy Survey (DES) has made public a large set of value-added data products derived from the images and catalogs processed and generated at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, corresponding to the first year (Y1) of the DES survey. Astronomers and cosmology aficionados can download … Continued

The Linux Clusters Institute (LCI) is currently seeking applications from institutions interested in hosting the 2019 LCI Introductory and Intermediate Workshops. These workshops provide education and technical training for the deployment and use of computing clusters to the high performance computing community worldwide. The deadline to submit your host site letter of interest form is … Continued

By Boswell Hutson As the world around us relies on smaller and smaller technologies, research to determine how to construct these miniscule structures is accelerating in importance. First, micro manufacturing of various materials became crucial to the development of tiny technologies we know today, but researchers in the College of Engineering at the University of … Continued

Every year, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign sponsors faculty members from the Urbana-Champaign campus through its NCSA Faculty Fellowship Program. Professor Ruby Mendenhall, Assistant Dean for Diversity and Democratization of Health Innovation at the Carle Illinois College of Medicine, and Associate Professor in African American Studies … Continued

Every year, the Grace Hopper Celebration brings together the world’s largest gathering of female technologists. As part of NCSA’s commitment to diversity, NCSA sponsors a select number of employees and post docs to attend the conference. This year, Kjellrun Olson, Bryan Fijalkovich, Farzaneh Masoud, and Madicken Munk will attend the Grace Hopper Celebration in Houston, … Continued

by Susan Szuch Take a dead fish, tie it to a string, and put it in a tank of water. Then, slowly start moving the water through the tank, swirling it faster and faster. Something seemingly miraculous happens—our scaled friend begins to swim. No, it’s not a mysterious rising from the dead. Instead, this “zombie” … Continued

The Roger Ebert Film Festival, or “Ebertfest,” has celebrated movies each spring for two decades in downtown Champaign and at the University of Illinois. The first Roger Ebert Symposium will explore the cinematic presentation of science and related subjects—bringing together an IMAX film shot from space, the former NASA astronaut who shot much of it, … Continued

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at Illinois has signed on a new partnership with AXIS Capital, a global provider of specialty lines insurance and treaty reinsurance. AXIS Capital, whose regional branch is located at the University of Illinois Research Park, is collaborating with NCSA Industry, a program at NCSA designed to solve industry’s … Continued

Tracking polar ice melting in both the Arctic and Antarctic, noting the clear-cutting of trees in the Arctic Circle or discovering unknown penguin colonies are just three of the observations scientists have made as the result of improved polar region topographical maps created using the Blue Waters supercomputer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications … Continued

by Katherine Kendig Rolls-Royce has an engineering problem that needs a large-scale software solution. Solving that problem, however, requires a multi-team effort: Illinois’ National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) delivers the scale courtesy of Blue Waters, its Cray® XC™ supercomputer; Livermore Software Technology Corporation (LSTC) provides the software, LS-DYNA; and Cray contributes additional expertise to … Continued

A collaboration between David Bock of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications’ (NCSA) Data Analysis and Visualization group and Brian Jewett of the University of Illinois has led to a meticulously-crafted visualization of a 2011 tornado that brought great destruction to Joplin, Missouri. By looking into this visualization, researchers have been able to gather vital … Continued