Supersized Science

Astrophysicists have been puzzled by their observations since the 1970s that only a small fraction of matter in the cloud becomes a star and part of a galaxy. They found a lot less of the universe's mass than expected in the middle of galaxies. Things changed when a multi-university collaboration produced a set of new supercomputer models of galaxies called FIRE, The Feedback in Realistic Environm...

Sathoshi Matsuoka came to the supercomputing conference SC14 and received the 2014 IEEE Computer Society Sidney Fernbach Award for innovation in the application of high performance computers. Dr. Matsuoka is a professor and leader of the Tsubame project, one of the world's fastest and most efficient supercomputing grid clusters. Tsubame is at the Global Scientific Information and Computing Center,...

Thomas Sterling spoke on a couple of panels at the supercomputing conference SC14 that looked at the promises and pitfalls on the path to developing exascale supercomputers, the next-generation of the world's fastest computers. Dr. Sterling is the executive associate director and chief scientist at the Center for Research in Extreme Scale Technologies at Indiana University, Bloomington. He's won t...

Best-selling author and physicist Brian Greene of Columbia University gave the keynote address at the SC14 conference. His latest book is The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos. In it Greene describes the hypothesis of multiple universes, and in particular that of a computer simulated multiverse. Brian Greene spoke with me by phone about the possibilities and future...

Computer scientists from the University of Texas at Austin's Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences, or ICES, teamed up with researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to present work at the technical program of the supercomputing conference SC14. It's titled "Parallelization of Reordering Algorithms for Bandwidth and Wavefront Reduction." Here to explain the work...

Larry Smarr was an invited speaker at SC14, where he shared his experience studying the ecology of microbes inside his body using the XSEDE cluster Gordon of the San Diego Supercomputer Center. Dr. Smarr is the director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, and he holds the Harry E. Gruber professorship in Computer Science and Engineering at the Jacobs Scho...

Two graduate students from UT Austin, Dhairya Malhotra and Amir Gholami, are up for Best Student Paper at the supercomputing conference SC14. They've co-authored the work with George Biros, a professor in mechanical engineering and computer science at UT Austin's Institute for Computational Engineering and Science. Dr. Biros is a two-time winner of the Gordon Bell Prize for innovation in high perf...

Larry Smarr is the founding Director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), a UC San Diego/UC Irvine partnership, and holds the Harry E. Gruber professorship in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) of UCSD’s Jacobs School of Engineering. At Calit2, he has continued to drive major developments in information infrastructure-- inclu...

George Biros is the W. A. "Tex" Moncrief Chair in Simulation-Based Engineering Sciences in the Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences and has Full Professor appointments with the departments of Mechanical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin. This clip is from an interview released mid-November as part of coverage of the SC14 conference.

A group of scientists peered thousands of years back into Europe's murky past and found a mysterious ancestor. Researchers used the Stampede supercomputer, supported by the National Science Foundation, to analyze and compare genomes from modern Europeans to ancient genomes from bones seven, eight, and twenty-four thousand years old.

This clip is from an interview released November 14, 2014 as part of coverage of the SC14 conference.

It turns out that bacteria inside your mouth drastically change how they act when you're diseased, for instance with the gum disease periodontitis. That's according to research led by Marvin Whiteley and Keith Turner of the University of Texas at Austin. Together they used the Stampede and Lonestar supercomputers of TACC to compare gene expression of 160,000 genes in healthy and diseased periodont...

This podcast interview features Alex Gorfe, an Assistant professor of integrative biology and pharmacology at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston Medical School. Dr. Gorfe used simulations with TACC's Lonestar and Stampede supercomputers to reveal new changes happening in the cell membrane as it interacts with an enzyme linked to cancer.