Blue Waters Illinois allocations awarded to 26 research teams

by Hannah Remmert

Twenty-six research teams at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have been allocated computation time on the National Center for Supercomputing Application’s (NCSA) sustained-petascale Blue Waters supercomputer after applying in Fall 2016. These allocations range from 25,000 to 600,000 node-hours of compute time over a time span of either six months or one year. The research pursuits of these teams are incredibly diverse, ranging anywhere from physics to political science.

Blue Waters is one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, capable of performing quadrillions of calculations every second and working with quadrillions of bytes of data. Its massive scale and balanced architecture help scientists and engineers—as well as scholars involved in the humanities and social sciences—tackle research challenges that could not be addressed with other computing systems.

Blue Waters provides University faculty and staff a valuable resource to perform groundbreaking work in computational science and further Illinois’ mission to foster discovery and innovation. The system presents a unique opportunity for the U of I faculty and researchers with about 2 percent of the capacity of Blue Waters allocated each year to projects at the University through a campuswide peer-review process.

The next round of proposals will be due March 15, 2017. To learn how you could receive an allocation to accelerate your research, visit https://bluewaters.ncsa.illinois.edu/illinois-allocations.

Fall 2016 Illinois allocations

General proposals

• Christina Cheng (Animal Biology): Structural Basis for Extreme Cold Stability in the Eye Lenses of Teleost Fishes
• Wendy K. Tam Cho and Yan Liu (Political Science): Enabling Redistricting Reform: A Computational Study of Zoning Optimization
• Marcelo Garcia (Civil and Environmental Engineering) and Paul Fischer (Computer Science): Direct Numerical Simulation of Turbulence and Sediment Transport in Oscillatory Boundary Layer Flows
• Deborah Levin (Aerospace Engineering): Kinetic Simulations of Unsteady Shock-Boundary Layer Interactions using Petascale Computing
• Deborah Levin (Aerospace Engineering): Modeling Plasma Flows with Kinetic Approaches using Hybrid CPU-GPU Computing
• Rafael Tinoco Lopez (Civil and Environmental Engineering): High Resolution Numerical Simulation of Oscillatory Flow and Sediment Transport through Aquatic Vegetation: Using the Highly Scalable Higher-Order Incompressible Solver Nek5000
• Zan Luthey-Schulten (Chemistry), Tyler Earnest (Beckman Institute), Zhaleh Ghaemi (Chemistry), Michael Hallock (Beckman Institute), and Thomas Kuhlman (Physics): Whole Cell Simulations of Escherichia coli and Saccharomyces cerevisiae
• Liudmila Mainzer (NCSA): Search for Missing Variants in Large Exome Sequencing Projects by Optimization of Analytic Pipelines, in application to Alzheimer’s Disease
• Rakesh Nagi and Ketan Date (Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering): Parallel Algorithms for Solving Large Assignment Problems
• Caroline Riedl, Vincent Andrieux, Naomi Makins, Marco Meyer, and Matthias Grosse Perdekamp (Physics): Mapping Proton Quark Structure in Momentum and Coordinate Phase Space using 17 PB of COMPASS Data
• Andre Schleife (Materials Science and Engineering) and Alina Kononov (Physics): Non-adiabatic Electron-ion Dynamics in Ion-irradiated Carbon Nanomembranes
• Diwakar Shukla (Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering): Unraveling the Molecular Magic of Witchweed
• Justin Sirignano (Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering): Distributed Learning with Neural Networks
• Edgar Solomonik (Computer Science): Performance Evaluation of New Algebraic Algorithms and Libraries
• Ryan Sriver and Hui Li (Atmospheric Sciences): Simulating Tropical Cyclone-Climate Interactions under Anthropogenic Global Warming using High-Resolution Configurations of the Community Earth System Model (CESM)
• Emad Tajkhorshid (Biochemistry and Pharmacology): Atomic Resolution Description of the Transport Cycle in Neurotransmitter Transporters
• Lucas Wagner (Physics): Quantum Monte Carlo Simulations of Magnetism and Models in Condensed Matter
• Junshik Um and Greg McFarquhar (Atmospheric Sciences): An Assessment of Impacts of Orientation, Non-Sphericity, and Size of Small Atmospheric Ice Crystals on Scattering Property Calculations to Improve In-Situ Aircraft Measurements, Satellite Retrievals, and Climate Models
• Donald J. Wuebbles and Xin-Zhong Liang (Atmospheric Sciences): Particulate Matter Prediction and Source Attribution for U.S. Air Quality Management in a Changing World

Exploratory Proposals

• William Gropp (NCSA and Computer Science) and Roy Campbell (Computer Science): Performance Analysis of Large-Scale Deep Learning Systems
• Les Gasser (Computer Science): Large-Scale Exploratory Social Simulations for Understanding Knowledge Flows, Cultural Patterns, and Emergent Organization Structures
• Ravishankar Iyer, Saurabh Jha, and Valerio Formicola (Electrical and Computer Engineering): Predicting Performance Degradation and Failures of Application through System Activity Monitoring
• Tomasz Kozlowski (Nuclear, Plasma, & Radiological Engineering): Improving Nuclear Power Competitiveness in a Deregulated Energy Market
• Praveen Kumar and Phong Le (Civil and Environmental Engineering): Extreme-scale Modeling — Role of Micro-topographic Variability on Nutrient Concentration and Mean Age Dynamics
• Jian Peng (Computer Science): Protein Structure Prediction using Deep Neural Networks
• Luke Olson (Computer Science): Large-Scale Solution of Constrained Systems via Monolithic Multigrid

For more information about these projects and other science and engineering work being propelled by Blue Waters, visit bluewaters.ncsa.illinois.edu.

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