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Content about high-performance computing

May 4, 2012
Now Entering its 20th Year, TOP500 List to Be Focus of Three Sessions at ISC’12

 

HAMBURG, Germany, – What began as a small statistics project in 1993 is today one of the most widely watched announcements in the high performance computing community. To mark the occasion, the TOP500 List of the world’s most powerful supercomputers will be featured in two sessions at the 2012 International Supercomputing Conference to be held June 17-21 at the Congress Center Hamburg.

April 27, 2012
e-FISCAL summer workshop July 3rd - 4th - registration opened

The second e-FISCAL workshop will be arranged on 3rd and 4th of July 2012  in Samos, Greece.

April 25, 2012
Containing multitudes

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
Testing diverse architectures

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

April 18, 2012
Carbon dioxide came before ice age melt

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

April 18, 2012
Clearing up a cloudy view on cloud formation

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

April 11, 2012
Blue Waters gets going

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
Design principles for nanoparticles

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

April 4, 2012
Computer code for cleaner coal

"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
Engineers enlist weather model to optimize offshore wind plan

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
The Perpetual Ocean

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
iSGTW & GridCast at EGI Community Forum 2012

Image courtesy André-Pierre Olivier.

March 21, 2012
A tree of life grows in Texas

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.

March 14, 2012
Collision chemistry

Chemical reactions aren't quite what we thought they were. Now, chemists are searching for the truth with the help of high-performance computing.

March 14, 2012
Forecasting the success of wind farms

How much electricity can a wind turbine produce? Finding the answer requires studying at least wind patterns and air turbulance, and weather data sets can be huge.

Professor of Scientific Computation Ashraf Hussein writes about how his team used massively parallel high performance computing to address this problem in Egypt.

February 29, 2012
iSGTW & GridCast go to Taipei

Image courtesy André-Pierre Olivier.

February 29, 2012
Seven innovative ways to cool a scientific computer

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
Catch the wave

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

February 22, 2012
Even molecules have their own waltz

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
When worlds collide

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
Europe's first 'green' exascale computer

The Mont-Blanc project, a European effort, is designing a new energy-efficient computer architecture at the exascale range by 2020.

February 15, 2012
Placing a price-tag on e-infrastructure

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.

February 8, 2012
Blowing up asteroids

Who could forget the 1998 blockbuster movie Armageddon? When an asteroid the size of Texas is discovered heading straight for Earth, NASA sends a bunch of blue-collar drillers to drill into its core to detonate a nuclear device from within.

Unfortunately for the aspiring space cowboys among us, Armageddon probably wasn’t scientifically correct. According to Robert Weaver, a researcher at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, a blast from the surface is enough to destroy Earth-threatening asteroids.

February 8, 2012
Data mining chemical patents

A great deal of information is embedded within the chemical research literature - information that could be invaluable in efforts to synthesize drugs. Now, a team of German researchers are developing software that could help to make that process more efficient and rapid by taking a page from a search engine's book.

February 8, 2012
Tying the Sun together

Solar flares affect us on Earth in a variety of ways, ranging from disrupted telecommunications to the beauty of the aurora borealis. But what do they mean for the sun?