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U of I, Great Lakes Consortium award Blue Waters resources to 18 research teams


Eighteen research teams from a wide range of disciplines have been awarded computational and data resources on the sustained-petascale Blue Waters supercomputer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

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 enable scientists and engineers to tackle research challenges that could not be addressed with other computing systems.

Up to 7 percent of the capacity of Blue Waters is allocated each year to projects at the University of Illinois through a campuswide peer-review process. Another 2 percent of that capacity is allocated through a similar process to projects at the almost 30 institutions that form the Great Lakes Consortium for Petascale Computation.

Illinois projects

  • Taekjip Ha, Institute for Genomic Biology, Molecular Mechanism of Nucleosome Stability and Dynamics
  • N.R. Aluru, Mechanical Science and Engineering, High-Accuracy Ab Initio Interaction Energy Calculations on Water-hexagonal-Boron-Nitride Interfaces
  • Zaida Luthey-Schulten, Chemistry, Simulations of Replication and Translation on the Whole Cell Level
  • Elif Ertekin, Mechanical Science and Engineering, Unveiling the Ultimate Limits of Thermal Conductivity in Nano Structured Low-Dimensional Superlattices Via Large Scale Non-Equilibrium Molecular Dynamics Simulations
  • Huck Beng Chew, Aerospace, Mechanics of Deformation in High Capacity Lithium-Ion Batteries Exploratory
  • Rohit Bhargava, Bioengineering, Solving the inverse problem in broadband spectroscopic imaging
  • Svetlana Lazebnik, Computer Science, Large-Scale Incremental Visual Learning Using Rich Feature Hierarchies
  • Laxmikant V. Kale, Computer Science, Performance Analysis and Optimization of the OpenAtom CPAIMD Application
  • John Georgiadis, Mechanical Science and Engineering, Real-Time Magnetic Resonance Elastography via GPU-Accelerators

Great Lakes Consortium projects

  • Dinshaw Balsara, University of Notre Dame, Simulating Protostellar Core Formation with Non-Ideal MHD
  • Kirit Makwana and Fausto Cattaneo, University of Chicago, Hui Li and William Daughton, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Dissipation in Magnetized Plasma Turbulence: From Fluid to Kinetic Scales
  • Jerry P. Draayer, Tomáś Dytrych, and Kristina D. Launey, Louisiana State University, Next-Generation ab initio Symmetry-Adapted No-Core Shell Model and its Impact on Nucleosynthesis
  • Sharon Glotzer, Joshua Anderson, and Jens Glaser, University of Michigan, and David Morse, University of Minnesota, Many-GPU Simulations of Soft Matter Design
  • Ashish Sharma, Edward L. Bensman, Harindra Joseph Fernando, and Jessica Hellmann, University of Notre Dame, Rao Kotamarthi, Argonne National Laboratory, Very High-resolution Numerical Modeling for Climate Extremes in Midwest U.S.
  • Peter Kasson, University of Virginia, Petascale Simulation of Influenza Fusion Mechanisms
  • Fatemeh Khalili-Araghi, University of Illinois at Chicago, Modeling the Bacterial Copper Transport Efflux Pump
  • Benoit Roux and Avisek Das, University of Chicago, The Mechanism of the Sarco/Endoplasmic Reticulum ATP-driven Calcium Pump
  • Renata Wentzcovitch, University of Minnesota, Computational Mineral Physics

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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