Supersized Science

What makes kevlar stop a bullet, at the atomic level? The properties of materials emerge from their molecular or atomic structure. Yet many details between the micro and the macro remain a mystery to science. Scientists are actively researching the rational design of targeted supramolecular architectures, with the goal of engineering their structural dynamics and their response to environmental cu...

Scientists have made the best computational modeling yet of mantle plumes. These are hypothesized, mushroom-shaped upwellings of hot rock from deep in the Earth that reach more than a thousand kilometers down. The scientists modeled mantle plumes on the Stampede supercomputer of the Texas Advanced Computing Center through an allocation on XSEDE, the eXtreme Science and Engineering Discovery Enviro...

Scientists have used big data to catch a big fish genome. Researchers assembled and annotated for the first time the genome of Seriola dorsalis, also known as California Yellowtail, a fish of high value to the sashimi, or raw seafood industry. The science team members were from the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service, Iowa State University, and the Instituto Politécnico Nacional in Mexico. They...

Imagine a new kind of computer that can quickly solve problems that would stump even the world’s most powerful supercomputers. Quantum computers are fundamentally different. They can store information as not only just ones and zeros, but in all the shades of gray in-between. Several companies and government agencies are investing billions of dollars in the field of quantum information. But what wi...

Artificial intelligence - or AI - is helping people make better decisions about how to manage water resources. That’s because scientists are taking the best tools of advanced computing to help make science-based decisions about complex and pressing problems in how to manage Earth’s resources, including water. A science panel on AI and water management meets in Austin, Texas on February 17th at the...

Some scientists think there might be light at the end of the tunnel in the hunt for better semiconductor materials for solar cells and LEDs. That’s according to an August 2017 study that used supercomputer simulations with graphics processing units to model nanocrystals of silicon. Solar cells have a problem with heat. Photovoltaics on solar panels lose some energy as heat in when they convert sun...

Some secrets of our skeletons might be found in the silky webs of golden orb weaver spiders, according to experiments guided by supercomputers. Scientists don’t yet understand the details of osteogenesis, or how bones form. A study found that silica combined with engineered silk derived from the dragline of golden orb weaver spider webs could be fine-tuned to activate genes in human stem cells tha...

Black holes make for a great space mystery. They're so massive that nothing, not even light, can escape a black hole once it gets close enough. A great mystery for scientists is the evidence of powerful jets of electrons and protons that shoot out of the top and bottom of some black holes. Yet no one knows how these jets form. Computer code called Cosmos now fuels supercomputer simulations of blac...

How do you make a building that can stand up to an earthquake? A summer camp at TACC smoothed the way for high school students to learn about the science behind building design for earthquakes. It's called Code @ TACC DesignSafe. The summer camp was funded by DesignSafe, a national program supported by the National Science Foundation. DesignSafe is a web-based research platform of the Natural Haza...

On July 28, 2017 The Texas Advanced Computing Center of the University of Texas at Austin dedicated a new supercomputer called Stampede2. Funded by a 30 million dollar award to TACC from the National Science Foundation, Stampede2 is the most powerful supercomputer at any academic institution in the U.S. Stampede2 will be used during its four-year lifecycle for scientific research and serve as a st...

Our technology is becoming more personal and wearable. Everything from fitness trackers, to sleep trackers, to heart rate headphones aim to keep vital information about us at our fingertips. In June of 2017 TACC hosted a summer camp for high school students to learn how to make and program their own custom wearable technology. It's called Code @ TACC Wearables. The Code @ TACC Wearables Camp guide...

Welcome to a retrospective look at a few of the science highlights of the Stampede supercomputer, one of the most powerful supercomputers in the U.S. for open science research between 2013-2017. Funded by the National Science Foundation and hosted by The University of Texas at Austin, the Stampede system at the Texas Advanced Computing Center achieved nearly 10 quadrillion operations per second. P...

In 2017, the Stampede supercomputer, funded by the National Science Foundation, completed its five-year mission to provide world-class computational resources and support staff to more than 11,000 U.S. users on over 3,000 projects in the open science community. But what made it special? Stampede was like a bridge that moved thousands of researchers off of soon-to-be decommissioned supercomputers,...

On June 11 through 16 of 2017, TACC hosted a week-long summer camp called Code @ TACC  Robotics, funded by the Summer STEM Funders Organization under the supervision of the KDK Harmon Foundation. Thirty-four students attended. Five staff scientists at TACC and two guest high school teachers from Dallas and Del Valle also gave the students instruction. The students divided themselves into teams eac...

Podcast host Jorge Salazar interviews Xian-He Sun, Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at the Illinois Institute of Technology. What if scientists could realize their dreams with big data? On the one hand you have parallel file systems for number crunching. On the other, you have Hadoop file systems, made for cloud computing with data analytics. The problem is that one doesn't know what th...

The World Wide Web is like an iceberg, with most of its data hidden below the surface. There lies the 'deep web,' estimated at 500 times bigger than the 'surface web' that most people see through search engines like Google. A innovative data-intensive supercomputer at TACC called Wrangler is helping researchers get meaningful answers from the hidden data of the public web. Wrangler uses 600 teraby...

Podcast host Jorge Salazar interviews Eva Nogales, Professor in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology at UC Berkeley and Senior Faculty Scientist and Howard Hughes Medical Investigator at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; and Ivaylo Ivanov, Associate Professor of in the Department of Chemistry at Georgia State University. Scientists have taken the closest look yet at molecule-sized...

  Podcast host Jorge Salazar interviews Lori Diachin of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. She's the Director for the Center for Applied Scientific Computing and Research Program Manager and Point of Contact for the Office of Science Advanced Scientific Computing Research organization. She also leads the Frameworks Algorithms and Scalable Technologies for Mathematics (FASTMath) SciDAC center....

Podcast host Jorge Salazar reports on SC16 in Salt Lake City, the 28th annual International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis. The event showcases the latest in supercomputing to advance scientific discovery, research, education and commerce.  The podcast interview features John McCalpin, a Research Scientist in the High Performance Computing Group at the...

Podcast host Jorge Salazar interviews Sadasivan Shankar , the Margaret and Will Hearst Visiting Lecturer in Computational Science and Engineering at the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University. Computers hardware speeds have grown exponentially for the past 50 years. We call this Moore's Law. But we haven't seen a Moore's Law for software. That's according...

Podcast host Jorge Salazar interviews Kelly Gaither, Director of Visualization at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC). Gaither is also the Director of Community Engagement and Enrichment for XSEDE, the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment, funded by the National Science Foundation. XSEDE identified 20 graduate and undergrad students to participate in a week-long event calle...

The SC16 Supercomputing Conference has focused on raising awareness and helping to change attitudes about diversity. That's according to SC16 General Chair John West, Director of Strategic Initiatives at the Texas Advanced Computing Center. West explained that long-term efforts are underway at SC16 to promote diversity in the supercomputing community. These include a new double-blind review of tec...

A new kind of supercomputer system has come online at the Texas Advanced Computing Center. It's called Hikari, which is Japanese for "light." What's new is that Hikari is the first supercomputer in the US to use solar panels and High Voltage Direct Current, or HVDC for its power. Hikari hopes to demonstrate that HVDC works not only for supercomputers, but also for data centers and commercial build...

It takes a supercomputer to grow a better soybean. A project called the Soybean Knowledge Base, or SoyKB for short, wants to do just that. Scientists at the University of Missouri-Columbia developed SoyKB. They say they've made SoyKB a publicly-available web resource for all soybean data, from molecular data to field data that includes several analytical tools. SoyKB has grown to be used by thousa...

Supercomputers might have helped unlock a new way to make controlled beams of gamma rays, according to scientists at the University of Texas at Austin. The simulations done on the Stampede and Lonestar systems at TACC will guide a real experiment later this summer in 2016 with the recently upgraded Texas Petawatt Laser, one of the most powerful in the world. The scientists say the quest for produc...