As we wind down the year and look back at all the stories we’ve posted about NCSA, our partners and all who keep us at the forefront of advanced research computing, here are the stories that most drew your attention in 2022.
Bright & Shiny
Delta Now Fully Operational
Delta, NCSA’s newest supercomputer, marked its debut this year. As excitement grew about all the research possibilities GPU-based Delta promised, news continued to trickle out until October, when it was finally certified by the National Science Foundation as a fully functioning supercomputer offering exciting research computing opportunities for years to come.
New in ’22: Three New Supercomputing Resources and More
Delta wasn’t the only supercomputer news coming out of NCSA this year as the Center rolled out or updated several other compute resources:
- Nightingale, a powerful HPC cluster that leverages capabilities provided to our clinical partners
- HOLL-I (Highly Optimized Logical Learning Instrument), is designed to handle large-scale AI and machine-learning tasks
- Clowder 2.0, an open-source data management framework for research
- vForge, the updated version of iForge, a high-performance computing cluster explicitly designed for NCSA’s industry partners
More Than Supercomputers
A 32-year Superstar in Cyberinfrastructure Retires
Beyond the hardware, we celebrated one of NCSA’s retiring virtuosos, Michelle Butler for all her accomplishments at NCSA. From humble beginnings in Illinois, Butler rose to prominence as she tackled challenges with aplomb. Her many accolades include projects as diverse as helping Pixar polish the movie Cars until it shone, to designing Blue Waters.
William Patterson Sends the Hip Hop Xpress Across Illinois and the U.S
If you’re looking for an uplifting tale to round out the year, William Patterson’s story reminds us of our power to change lives positively. A Fiddler Innovation Fellow, Patterson runs the Hip Hop Xpress, a bus loaded with STEM materials and projects designed to inspire people in underserved neighborhoods. The bus is only one small aspect of Patterson’s work, and NCSA is proud to be a part of the wonder and joy he brings to communities.
Prolific Partners
Dark Energy Survey Makes Public Catalog of Nearly 700 Million Astronomical Objects
NCSA has a long legacy of partnering with groups with similar research and scholarship goals. Some of our partnerships have yielded astounding results.
NCSA joined a global collaboration that included the Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and the National Science Foundation’s NOIRLab to help catalog and prepare DR2, the second release of images and object catalogs from the Dark Energy Survey, or DES.
This is a momentous milestone. The Dark Energy Survey collaboration took pictures of distant celestial objects in the night sky for six years. Now, after carefully checking the quality and calibration of the images captured by the Dark Energy Camera, we are releasing this second batch of data to the public. We invite professional and amateur scientists alike to dig into what we consider a rich mine of gems waiting to be discovered.
Rich Kron, DES Director, Fermilab and University of Chicago
National Science Foundation Awards More Than $20M to NCSA for its Forthcoming ACCESS Program
Closer to Earth, you can find NCSA’s other interesting and fruitful partnerships. For example, ACCESS is a nationwide organization of supercomputing resources funded by the NSF. And NCSA was awarded $25m to help make it possible.
Making History
A Reimagined Internet
NCSA’s history-making work has proven a popular topic over the year. Decades after developing the very first graphical internet browser, we continue to be a part of the evolving architecture of the internet, tending to the needs of users and future-proofing access to knowledge in years to come.
Historic Blue Waters Supercomputer Ceasing Operations
The work done on Blue Waters exemplifies the effect NCSA has had on the world. We reported early in 2022, that after more than a dozen years – some of them as the largest supercomputer in the U.S. – this groundbreaking system was being retired.
Blue Waters enabled computational, data analysis, and machine learning/artificial intelligence investigations that could not be done otherwise. Through the years, the increasing numbers of projects identified as “data-intensive” processing or as doing machine learning/artificial intelligence showed the leadership of Blue Waters and the impact it was making. Many projects were not just tightly coupled simulations, data-intensive analysis or machine learning but also combined these methods with multi-scale and multiphysics simulation to achieve cutting-edge results.
William Kramer, PI, Blue Waters program director, NCSA
NCSA Reflects on 35 Years as a Supercomputing Powerhouse
Finally, the depth and breadth of what NCSA has accomplished is captured in this article, including the reflections of NCSA’s leadership over the years.
It’s been another progressive year at NCSA. We’re looking forward to bringing you more stories that amaze, excite and inspire in 2023.