Great Lakes Consortium awards time on Blue Waters supercomputer

The Blue Waters supercomputer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign benefits the scientific community in innumerable ways. Researchers can use the most powerful high performance computing system for fully open research through a few doorways, including the Great Lakes Consortium for Petascale Computation (GLCPC) allocations.

Member institutions of the GLCPC include universities and colleges, national laboratories, the Southeastern Universities Research Association, educational foundations, and K-12 school districts who are developing educational and workforce development programs to help realize the full potential of petascale computing.

Nine research teams are awarded computational time, storage and support on Blue Waters this year through this peer-reviewed allocation method, including projects that map and model the vegetation of the Great Lakes Basin; simulating the atmosphere during and after a wildfire; and using a framework to look at potential policy responses to climate change. The nine teams will use approximately 4.6 million node hours (about 147 million core hour equivalents) from now until May 31, 2018.

The GLCPC consortium has been part of the Blue Waters project for the past nine years and makes annual peer-reviewed allocations on the Blue Waters supercomputer to research projects from GLCPC member institutions.

Full list of 2017-18 projects and investigators:

• Claude-Andre Faucher-Giguere, Northwestern University: Pushing the Dynamic Range: Simulating the Co-Evolution of Galaxies and Black Holes
• Yongyang Cai, Ohio State University: Policy Responses to Climate Change in a Dynamic Stochastic Economy
• Said Elghobashi, University of California, Irvine: Dispersion of Fully Resolved Liquid Droplets in Isotropic Turbulent Flow
• John F. Hawley, University of Virginia: Tilted Disks around Black Holes: Elucidating the Alignment Mechanism
• Venkat Raman, University of Michigan: Highly-Scalable Open-Source Solvers for Turbulent Combustion
• Jennifer Corcoran, University of Minnesota: Image Processing to Build a Multi-Temporal Vegetation Elevation Model (MTVEM) of Great Lakes Basin
• Eric Johnsen, University of Michigan: Numerical Simulations of Collapsing Cavitation Bubbles
• Dinshaw Balsara, Notre Dame: Towards a Resilient CAF and MPI-4 Programming Paradigm and Studying Two-Fluid Electrodynamic and MHD Processes
• Marshall Stageberg, Michigan State University: Simulating the Atmospheric Response to a Wildland Fire using a Cloud-Resolving Model

To see all current Blue Waters projects, visit: https://bluewaters.ncsa.illinois.edu/science-teams.

For more information on the GLCPC, visit: http://www.greatlakesconsortium.org/.

About NCSA

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign provides supercomputing and advanced digital resources for the nation’s science enterprise. At NCSA, University of Illinois faculty, staff, students, and collaborators from around the globe use advanced digital resources to address research grand challenges for the benefit of science and society. NCSA has been advancing one third of the Fortune 50 for more than 30 years by bringing industry, researchers, and students together to solve grand challenges at rapid speed and scale.

About NCSA’s Blue Waters project

NCSA’s Blue Waters petascale supercomputer is one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, and is the fastest supercomputer on a university campus. Blue Waters uses hundreds of thousands of computational cores to achieve peak performance of more than 13 quadrillion calculations per second. Blue Waters has more memory and faster data storage than any other open system in the world. Scientists and engineers across the country use the computing and data power of Blue Waters to tackle a wide range of challenges. Recent advances that were not possible without these resources include computationally designing the first set of antibody prototypes to detect the Ebola virus, simulating the HIV capsid, visualizing the formation of the first galaxies and exploding stars, and understanding how the layout of a city can impact supercell thunderstorms.

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