Supersized Science

University of Texas System Chancellor William McRaven gave a podcast interview at TACC during a visit for its building expansion dedication and the announcement of a $30 million award from the National Science Foundation for the new Stampede 2 supercomputer system. Chancellor McRaven spoke of his path to lead the UT System of 14 Institutions, the importance of supercomputers to Texans and to the n...

On May 15th Austin, Texas held a Zika Hackathon. More than 50 data scientists, engineers, and UT Austin students gathered downtown at the offices of Cloudera, a big data company. They used big data to help fight the spread of Zika. Mosquitos carry and spread the Zika virus, which can cause birth defects and other symptoms like fever. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control is now ramping up collectio...

Chemical engineering researcher Roseanna Zia has begun to shed light on the secret world of colloidal gels - liquids dispersed in a solid. Yogurt, shampoo, and Jell-o are just a few examples. Sometimes gels act like liquids, and sometimes they act like a solid. Understanding the theory behind these transitions can translate to real-world applications, such as helping understand why mucus - also a...

Scientists might find a friend in the open source software called Docker . It's a platform that bundles up the loose ends of applications - the software and the dependencies that sustain it - into something fairly light that can run on any system. As more scientists share not only their results but their data and code, Docker is helping them reproduce the computational analysis behind the results....

UT Austin astronomer Steven Finkelstein eyes Wrangler supercomputer for HETDEX extragalactic survey, in this interview with host Jorge Salazar. A million galaxies far, far away are predicted to be discovered before the year 2020 thanks to a monumental mapping of the night sky in search of a mysterious force. That's according to scientists working on HETDEX, the Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy E...

Paleoanthropologist Denne Reed of UT Austin is interviewed by host Jorge Salazar about making connections in big data from fossils of human origins. New discoveries might lie buried deep in the data of human fossils. That's according to Denné Reed, an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin). Reed is the principal investigator of PaleoC...

Computer scientist Joshua New of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory speaks with host Jorge Salazar on how to optimize buildings to save energy using computer models. Saving energy saves money. Scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) are using supercomputers to do just that by making virtual versions of millions of buildings in the U.S. The Wrangler data-intensive supercomputer is working...

UT Austin biologist Rebecca Young discuss her work with host Jorge Salazar about how she traces the genes behind monogamous behavior using the Wrangler supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center. Scientists at the Hofmann Lab of UT Austin are using the Wrangler data-intensive supercomputer to find orthologs — genes common to different species. They'll search for them in each of the major...

Scientists and engineers at TACC have created a new kind of supercomputer to handle big data. Featured on the podcast is Niall Gaffney, Director of Data Intensive Computing at the Texas Advanced Computing Center. Gaffney leads efforts at TACC to bring online a new data-intensive supercomputing system called Wrangler. The National Science Foundation's Division of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure awarde...

The 2015 ACM Gordon Bell Prize, given in recognition of outstanding achievement in high-performance computing, was awarded to researchers Johann Rudi and Omar Ghattas of the Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin. They share the award with their study co-authors, who utilized the Stampede supercomputer of the Texas Advanced Computing Center and th...

This November 2015 marks 100 years of Einstein's field equations that describe space and time as one interwoven continuum - and predict the existence of black holes and more. Manuela Campanelli is a professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology and the Director of the Center for Computational Relativity and Gravitation. Dr. Campanelli was invited to give a presentation at SC15 titled "Reveali...

Thomas Jordan is a professor of Earth Sciences at University of Southern California and the Director of the Southern California Earthquake Center. It's a big national collaboration of over a thousand earthquake experts and 70 institutions. Dr. Jordan uses the computational resources of XSEDE, the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment, to model earthquakes and help reduce their risk...

Alan Alda, actor, director and writer, has had a lifelong interest in science. He hosted the PBS program Scientific American Frontiers from 1993 to 2005, an experience he called "the best thing I ever did in front of a camera." Perhaps best known as surgeon 'Hawkeye' Pierce on the TV series MASH, Alda has won seven Emmys, six Golden Globes, and three Directors Guild of America awards for directing...

Robert McLay manages the software tools group in high performance computing at the Texas Advanced Computing Center. Dr. McLay is one of the developers of XALT, a software tool developed with funding by the National Science Foundation. XALT tracks user codes and environments on a computer cluster. Robert McLay and Mark Fahey of the Argonne National Laboratory will be co-leading a session called "Un...

This podcast features an interview with biologist Mikhail Matz, Department of Integrative Biology, College of Natural Sciences, The University of Texas at Austin. Matz was part of a study funded by the National Science Foundation and the Australian Institute of Marine Science. In June of 2015 they published results in the journal Science that found the first evidence that corals can genetically ad...

Podcast host Jorge Salazar interviews scientists Michael Sacks, Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin; and Ming-Chen Hsu, Department of Mechanical Engineering at Iowa State University. New supercomputer simulations have come closer than ever to capturing real behavior of human heart valves. The studies focused on how heart valve tissue realistica...

Host Jorge Salazar interviews scientists Karen Vasquez and Albino Bacolla of the University of Texas at Austin. Supercomputers have helped scientists find a surprising link between cross-shaped pieces of DNA and human cancer, according to a study at The University of Texas at Austin. DNA naturally folds itself into cross-shaped structures called cruciforms that jut out along the sprawling length o...

Host Jorge Salazar interviews scientists Min Chen of Rice University and Jeroen Tromp of Princeton University. An international science team reported a discovery of gigantic rock structures hidden deep under East Asia, centered on the Tibetan Plateau. Scientists used supercomputers to process earthquake data and make images in 3-D down to depths of about 900 kilometers, or about 560 miles below gr...

Host Jorge Salazar reports from the Texas Advanced Computing Center an interview with Michael Grabe, an associate professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry and the Cardiovascular Research Institute at the University of California, San Francisco. For the first time ever, scientists designed completely from scratch a protein molecule that behaves like a slice of life. It mimics a natur...

Matthew Hanlon manages the Web and Mobile Applications Group at the Texas Advanced Computing Center. And Matt Vaughn directs the Life Sciences Computing Group at TACC. Vaughn and Hanlon present a one-hour core conversation for South by Southwest Interactive on Monday, March 16. It's called A Next Generation Platform for Open Data . In the podcast they discuss their work on the Arabidopsis Informat...

John Fonner is part of the Life Sciences Computing Group at TACC, and Rion Dooley manages the web and cloud services group plus he leads the Agave API project. Fonner and Dooley present a hands-on four-hour workshop for South by Southwest Interactive on Tuesday, March 17th. It's called Science as a Service and other Lies: Hacking Big Data on the Web . In the podcast they discuss science-as-a-servi...

Maytal Dahan is a research engineer and science associate at the Texas Advanced Computing Center. She presents a meet up for South by Southwest Interactive on Saturday, March 14. It's called Science and Tech Meet Up: Scientists and Geeks Unite! . In the podcast Dahan talks about some interesting intersections where science meets software development, and she predicts the next big thing at SXSW --...

Host Jorge Salazar reports from the Texas Advanced Computing Center an interview with Klaus Schulten, professor of Physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. One of life's strongest bonds has been discovered by a science team doing research on biofuels with the help of supercomputers. The biomolecular interaction binds at about half the strength of a chemical covalent bond the piec...

Materials with novel electrical properties discovered using XSEDE computational resources Stampede and Lonestar supercomputers of TACC. This podcast features an interview with materials research scientist Xiaofeng Qian of Texas AM University.

Scientists have used supercomputers to find what they say is the best evidence yet that a plant's genes  sensitive to cold and drought will help it adapt to changes in its environment. What they studied in plants was gene expression, instructions coded in DNA that regulate how many proteins it makes. Gene expression gives rise to traits such as tolerance of cold or drought, and it can evolve throu...