Feature Channels: Supercomputing

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Under the joint Collaboration of Oak Ridge, Argonne, and Lawrence Livermore (CORAL) initiative, the U.S. Department of Energy announced a $200 million investment to deliver a next-generation supercomputer, known as Aurora, to the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility. When commissioned in 2018, this supercomputer will be open to all scientific users – drawing America’s top researchers to Argonne.

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Predicting the types of clouds over the ocean is critical for climate projections. However, current climate models lack the spatial resolution necessary for accurate characterization of certain processes.

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The Energy Sciences Network is the Internet connection you wish you had – and more.

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With a $1.3 million grant from the Air Force Research Laboratory, researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute will explore the design and potential of next-generation supercomputers that incorporate a highly efficient “neuromorphic” processor, which more closely represents the human brain in its architectural design.

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To find a standard 3D neuron reconstruction algorithm, BigNeuron will sponsor a series of international hackathons and workshops where contending algorithms will be ported onto a common software platform to analyze neuronal physical structure using the same core dataset. All ported algorithms will be bench-tested at the Department of Energy's NERSC and ORNL, as well as Human Brain Project supercomputing centers.

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Brookhaven physicist Simon Billinge illustrates how advances in computing and applied mathematics can improve the predictive value of models used to design new materials.

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Brookhaven Lab/ATLAS physicist Torre Wenaus describes an effort to trickle small “grains” of data generated by the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Europe into small pockets of unused supercomputing time, sandwiched between big jobs on high-performance supercomputers.

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Researchers at Queen’s University Belfast are creating ground-breaking computer software which has the potential to develop some of the world’s fastest super computers.

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Beginning today, anyone can download a safe and free app that will put their computer or Android-based mobile device to work to form a virtual supercomputer to help The Scripps Research Institute screen millions of chemical compounds to identify new drug leads for treating Ebola.

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Researchers studying iron-based superconductors are combining novel electronic structure algorithms with the high-performance computing power of the Titan supercomputer to predict spin dynamics, or the ways electrons orient and correlate their spins in a material.

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Iowa State researchers will scale up their nuclear physics studies for Cori, the Energy Department's next-generation supercomputer. What the researchers learn could one day lead to safer, more efficient forms of nuclear power.

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The groundwork for Virginia Tech’s Wu Feng’s big data research in a “cloud” began in the mid-2000s with a multi-institutional effort to identify missing gene annotations in genomes. Today, this work is being formalized and extended as part of an National Science Foundation/Microsoft Computing in the Cloud grant that seeks to commoditize biocomputing in the cloud.

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The petascale supercomputing system at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute clocks in at a top peak processing speed of 1048.6 teraflops per second, making it the 43rd most powerful system in the world, according to the most recent TOP500 list.

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Columbia researchers used Brookhaven Lab supercomputer simulations to discover unexpected transitions in graphene and other promising super materials under strain.

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A scalable computer code developed at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) was used to run complex equations on a blisteringly fast supercomputer, resulting in advances in understanding solar wind and the heliosphere.

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Iowa State University's James Vary is leading a team of physicists in a study of the structure and reactions of rare and exotic nuclei. The team's findings could have applications in nuclear energy, nuclear security and nuclear astrophysics.

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Researchers studying more effective ways to convert woody plant matter into biofuels have identified fundamental forces that change plant structures during pretreatment processes used in the production of bioenergy.

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For the past two years, Wu Feng has led a research team that has now created a new generation of efficient data management and analysis software for large-scale, data-intensive scientific applications in the cloud. “Our goal was to keep up with the data deluge in the DNA sequencing space. Our result is that we are now analyzing data faster, and we are also analyzing it more intelligently,” Feng said.

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A team of researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, led by Petros Drineas, associate professor of computer science at Rensselaer, has been awarded a four-year, $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation Division of Information & Intelligent Systems to explore the new strategies for mining petabyte data.

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Dean, a 1979 engineering alumnus, is responsible for developing technology that allows us to plug anything into computers—keyboards, mice, monitors, modems, printers, speakers, scanners—and have the devices and PCs communicate seamlessly. He holds three of the nine original patents on the computer that all PCs are based upon, and more than 40 patents overall.

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Jack Dongarra, distinguished professor of computer science at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, is designing software that will be critical in making the next generation of supercomputers operational.

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The way the power of supercomputers is measured is about to change. Since 1993, Jack Dongarra, distinguished professor of computer science at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, has led the ranking of the world's top 500 supercomputers. The much-celebrated biannual TOP500 list is compiled using Dongarra's benchmark system, called Linpack. But Dongarra says Linpack hasn't kept pace with supercomputing needs and must be updated.

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ORNL's Titan supercomputer has completed rigorous acceptance testing to ensure the functionality, performance and stability of the machine, one of the world’s most powerful supercomputing systems for open science.