Content about high-performance computing

When politicians can't agree on spending priorities and decide to shut down the government, federal functions come to a grinding halt. In the US, this scenario has repeated a dozen times since the Reagan era; Eric Svensen looked to a supercomputer to find out why.

Discover how the DNANANO project has been using the Curie supercomputer — a PRACE tier-0 system — to help design nanocages for targeted drug delivery.

Simulating one of these nanocages for just 100 nanoseconds would take nearly a decade on a normal workstation. However, by accessing PRACE resources, the research group was able to carry out multiple simulations of this kind in less than thirty days.

The European CHAIN-REDS project, which ran for 30 months starting in December 2012, worked to promote and support technological and scientific collaboration across e-infrastructures established and operated in different continents, in order to define a path towards a global e-infrastructure ecosystem. The CHAIN-REDS vision is that this ecosystem will enable virtual research communities, research groups, and even individual researchers to access and efficiently use worldwide distributed resources (e.g., computing, storage, data, services, tools, and applications). A booklet published last month gives an overview of the project’s success in facilitating this ambitious vision and assesses the project’s global impact.

You may think XSEDE is nothing more than access to high-performance computing resources. But did you know XSEDE offers a full range of training opportunities to teach your scientists and engineers how to work with supercomputers?  

Seismologists have always relied on surface observation to piece together models of what they thought Earth’s interior looked like. These models served them well for years, but they were unable to map out the planet’s interior with certainty, until now. A team of scientists is using the powerful US Titan supercomputer to do just that.

Buying a supercomputer can be a tough sell for administrators to make. A study by Clemson University researchers may change the argument.

Using the Oakley supercomputer and a very small, frozen tuning fork, Joseph Heremans is rewriting our science textbooks. His computational research team has discovered that phonons — sound and heat particles — yield to magnetic fields.

Renowned computational biologist Klaus Schulten used the supercomputers at the Texas Advance Computing Center and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications to model the binding force of proteins found in cow stomachs. What he discovered may lead us to cheaper biofuel production.

Big data opens doors previously closed to researchers, yet the volume of data sends scientists looking for analytical tools to bring order from the informational cacophony. Prior to tools like Bioconductor, there were few options for working with quantitative data types; a discordant score for deciphering the human genetic code was the result.

Today, genomic analysis machines create a common language for users, and build a worldwide community to foster developers from among subject matter experts. These instruments make beautiful music from a mass of genomic information.

Kelly Gaither, co-principal investigator on the XSEDE project and director of visualization at Texas Advanced Computing Center, offers further thoughts on the topic of gender diversity following our 28 January article 'Why aren’t there more women in HPC?' by Toni Collis.