Entries filed under “Applied HPC”

The Georgia Institute of Technology Office of the Provost formally announced today the formation of the Georgia Tech Institute for Data and High Performance Computing (IDH).  HPC has become continually important to George Tech in order to further their research activities not directly related to the computational sciences.

As we look to high performance computing to drive advanced breakthroughs in science, health, energy and other industries, leveraging Georgia Tech’s strongest assets — world-class researchers in computing, experts across nearly every problem domain, and low barriers to collaboration — is what will set us apart,” said Dr. Mark Allen, senior vice provost for Research and Innovation at Georgia Tech. “The creation of the Institute for Data and High Performance Computing provides the organizational foundation to harness our strategic capabilities and attack the most challenging problems that face society today.”

The main goal of the IDH will be “to enhance Georgia Tech’s scientific contributions, reputation and impact, focusing on the exploitation of HPC technology coupled with the development of novel computational methods.”  The institute’s interim director will be Dr. Richard Fujimoto, Regents’ Professor and head of Computational Science & Engineering in the College of Computing.

Georgia Tech has made substantial infrastructure and personnel investments in high performance computing, and achieved many important successes, over the last five years,” said Dr. Fujimoto. “I fully anticipate that IDH will enable us to advance beyond prototypes to new levels of accomplishment in the high performance computing area.”

The IDH has quite the list of forward thinkers in computational science, including: Dr. David Bader, Professor in the College of Computing, and Dr. Ron Hutchins, Chief Technology Officer for Georgia Tech.  For more info, check out the new IDH website here.

The US Department of Energy announced today that they have laid out supercomputing allocations totaling over 1.6billion hours to 69 cutting-edge projects.  The allocations come through the DoE Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment [INCITE] program.  The INCITE program grants large buckets of HPC resources to groups working on the most challenging of research.  The goal being to drive research results with immediate resources.

Computation and supercomputing are critical to solving some of our greatest scientific challenges,” said Secretary Chu. “This year’s INCITE awards reflect the enormous growth in demand for complex modeling and simulation capabilities, which are essential to improving our economic prosperity and global competitiveness.”

The 69 projects were awarded time at the DoE’s leadership computing facilities [LCF's].  Namely, Argonne National Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory.  This iteration’s projects include:

• Energy, including advanced systems for fusion energy and nuclear power, and improving combustion to increase efficiency and reduce emissions to develop safe and renewable energy solutions.
• Environment, highlighting research into carbon sequestration, developing better insight of natural phenomena like earthquakes and hurricanes, and developing near-zero-emissions combustion devices.
• Climate change, featuring projects to improve climate models, understand global warming, study the effects of turbulence in oceans, and simulate clouds on a global scale.
• Biology, including understanding protein membranes to improve drug discovery, diagnostics and better treatment of diseases.

For more info on the various projects and the INCITE program, check out their website here.

Los Alamos National Lab has released a list of, what they consider, their top ten laboratory science stories of 2009.  The list was based on global viewership of online media content and major programmatic milestones.

Often our top breakthroughs in terms of scientific impact are also the ones that garner the most attention in the media,” said Terry Wallace, Laboratory principal associate director of science, technology, and engineering. “This was certainly the case for Roadrunner and for the Ardi discovery. Sometimes, the best measure of impact is programmatic, such as the successful DARHT two-axis hydrotest, or our teams using nanotechnology for energy breakthroughs. In combination, this collection of advances points to the diverse capabilities at Los Alamos that we harness for national security science.”

So, what made the list!?

1. Roadrunner: “The Roadrunner supercomputer at Los Alamos is the first computing system in the world to reach a petaflop, computer jargon for 1 million billion calculations per second, a record that stood for a year and a half. But the real accomplishment is that Roadrunner reached that goal using an entirely new computing architecture.”
2. Ardi: “A Los Alamos National Laboratory geologist is part of an international research team responsible for discovering the oldest nearly intact skeleton of Ardipithecus ramidus, who lived 4.4 million years ago.”
3. Climate modeling and monitoring: “LANL innovations in high-resolution climate modeling and monitoring led to new insights into the impacts of climate change at global and regional scales.”
4. MagViz: “LANL’s MagViz team pioneered the use of modified magnetic resonance imagery (MRI) technology to distinguish and alert airport security staff to potentially dangerous liquids and gels in airport carry-on baggage.”
5. First dual-axis hydrodynamic test: “LANL scientists and engineers fired the first-ever double-viewpoint, multiframe hydrodynamic test at DARHT, the Laboratory’s Dual Axis Radiographic Hydrodynamic Test facility – leading to future experiments at LANL and across the nation’s nuclear security enterprise, supporting the stockpile stewardship and weapons assurance mission.”
6. Hurricane Prediction: “A system of sensors developed by Los Alamos National Laboratory for the National Nuclear Security Administration’s nonproliferation mission has also begun to give meteorologists their most detailed view of the relationship between hurricanes and lightning.”
7. Fuel from plants: “Los Alamos National Laboratory has teamed with Solix Biofuels, Inc. to use an award-winning LANL sound-wave technology to optimize production of algae-based fuel in a cost-effective, scalable, and environmentally benign fashion.”
8. IBEX: “The invisible structures of space are becoming less so, as scientists look out to the far edges of the solar wind bubble that separates our solar system from the interstellar cloud through which it flies.”
9. Laser-particle acceleration for cancer therapy: “Laser-particle acceleration is an emerging area of physics expected to enable significant future advances in cancer radiotherapy. An international team of physicists led by LANL has accelerated protons to world-record high energies that are otherwise only achievable with large accelerator facilities. Proton radiation at the achieved energy range can be used, for example, to treat eye cancer.”
10. Nanotechnology for Energy Frontiers: “Two LANL teams were awarded lead roles as DOE Energy Frontier Research Centers to develop new materials for energy.”

For more info on each science topic, read their full article here.