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May 16, 2012

Watch the TeleHuman and BodiPod technologies in action. Image courtesy Human Media Lab, Queen's University.

May 2, 2012

Video courtesy of Brookhaven National Laboratory in Brookhaven, New York, USA.

The US Department of Energy has started putting together a series of videos called "Breakthrough," profiling research at various national laboratories. That's how we came across this week's visual.

May 2, 2012

An international collaboration brings high-performance computing and advanced visualization to the Eastern Mediterranean, enabling a wide range of research applications in the process.

May 2, 2012

For years, researchers believed that Parkinson's disease is caused by the long 'fibrils' found in the neurons of people with Parkinson's disease. Now new computational models show that the real cause may be tiny, oft-overlooked ring structures.

April 25, 2012

Advanced computing is helping humanities and social science scholars analyze troves of data about worlds both real and virtual, shedding light on human behavior.

April 25, 2012

The Einstein@Home volunteer computing project has enabled the public to discover 27 new stars. When someone finds a new pulsar, not only do they enter the history books, they also get a personal email or even a signed-for-letter from project leader Bruce Allen.

April 25, 2012

Today's open-source hardware movement empowers poor rural communities to communicate freely over Wi-Fi,  helps researchers independently measure the speed of neutrinos, and creates new business markets by allowing entrepreneurs to get involved in large projects. Proponents say 2012 is the year open hardware will take flight. But before take-off, the community needs best practice standards to serve as a flight plan.

April 25, 2012

Not all computing systems are suited to the same tasks. But which tasks match with which architectures?

April 18, 2012

High performance computing helps scientists answer the question: What came first - greenhouse gases or global warming?

April 18, 2012

Researchers review computer simulations in combination with two decades of observations to get a fix on cloud formation.

April 18, 2012

Video courtesy of Los Alamos National Laboratory.

April 11, 2012

A volume visualization of the kinetic energy shows interesting structures inside the star as the supernova process begins. Data courtesy of the Stanford Woosley PRAC team, UC Santa Cruz and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Visualization courtesy of Blue Waters visualization staff, Rob Sisneros and Dave Semeraro.

April 11, 2012

Researchers are using supercomputers to investigate nanocrystals for photovoltaics and catalysis.

April 11, 2012

The NASA Advanced Supercomputing Division recently released a technical whitepaper that discusses their experiences over the last year using a network flow analysis tool they developed in-house.

April 4, 2012

"Coal gasification" is a cleaner way to extract energy from coal. But it's also complex—so complex that it's difficult to model and difficult to validate models of the process.

April 4, 2012

By running a sophisticated weather model on supercomputers, environmental engineers have defined optimal placement of a grid of four wind farms off the US East Coast. The model successfully balances production at times of peak demand and significantly reduces costly spikes and zero-power events.

April 4, 2012

Image courtesy of NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center.

Not all visualizations are created equal. Some stand out for their elegance in conveying information efficiently. Others are outstanding for the beauty they achieve without abandoning the goal of conveying information.

March 28, 2012

Bug-free code is an impossibility. So, how can researchers know when the bugs in their code are minor, with no real impact, or show-stoppers that completely change the entire result?

March 21, 2012

Researchers used supercomputing to develop smarter, faster, and more accurate genetic alignment and tree-building algorithms and applied them to some of the largest biological datasets ever created.

February 29, 2012

As computer chips get smaller and faster, they’re getting hotter and hotter. Typically, almost 40% of a data center’s electricity bill is because of its cooling equipment.

To help reach the exaflop barrier and beyond, some data centers are investing in better cooling than current standard technology. We’ve taken a look at seven promising methods that will help scientific e-infrastructures stay cool.

February 22, 2012

Modeling and simulation using high performance computing help scientists advance work with supernovas.

February 22, 2012

Methane is one of the most abundant organic gases on Earth and safer for the environment when considering it as an alternative fuel to burning petrol or gasoline. But, as it’s a gas, storing it under normal pressure inside a fuel tank would only get you 100 meters or so down the road. Now, high-performance computer simulations are helping chemists virtually create thousands of new materials, so they can find the best one to store more methane within a fuel tank.

February 22, 2012

An IT worker puts his daughter's laptop through the 2012 notebook tough-test.

February 22, 2012

If the sun is anything, it is reassuring. It rises, sets, and rises again, allowing us to grow crops, get tan, and power homes, just to name a few of humanity’s most important life-sustaining functions. No wonder it was considered a deity by countless ancient civilizations.

Like many other things, however, our sun is prettier at a distance. Turns out the sun is a violent place where magnetic fields and fusion energy spew plumes of radiation into outer space and at Earth. Physicists call this phenomenon space weather, and seek to understand it by running increasingly complex simulations on increasingly powerful computing systems.

February 15, 2012

As funders consider how to best invest in the future of e-infrastructure, a number of questions arise: How much does e-infrastructure cost? How much impact does it have, and are funders getting value for their money? A number of projects are working to find concrete answers to these and other questions, at a time when getting an accurate price has never been more crucial to a sustainable future for scientific computing.