URBANA, Ill., July 11, 2017 — The Blue Waters Petascale Computing Resource Allocations (PRAC) have been awarded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to fourteen teams of researchers from across the U.S. The awarded allocations reached a combined total of 84.5 million node hours (2.7 billion core hour equivalents), valued at $52.4 million. Additionally, researchers can use the most powerful high performance computing system for fully open research through a few doorways, including the Great Lakes Consortium for Petascale Computation (GLCPC) allocations.

NSF Awards 

The NSF granted three PRAC awards to Caroline Riedl, Ryan Sriver and Emad Tajkhorshid at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Riedl is using Blue Waters to map proton quark structureusing petabytes of Common Muon and Proton Apparatus for Structure and Spectroscopy (COMPASS) data from CERN. Sriver will conduct collaborative research between the University of Illinois and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) aimed at assessing international climate using high resolution modeling. Tajkhorshid and his team will use the award to study chemo-mechanical properties of motor proteins and the structure of and function of the macromolecular complexes.

Blue Waters’ extreme scale computing and data management capabilities allow principal investigator (PI) Thomas Jordan from the University of Southern California to improve earthquake forecasting and seismic hazard analyses. This project develops and tests earthquake models that capture physics in a more realistic manner than ever before, and to run simulations at finer resolutions and higher frequencies. The results better quantify seismic hazards and their uncertainties.

Blue waters simulation capabilities allow researchers to recreate faint galaxies and probe galaxy formations, as well as merging black holes and collapsing supernovae. Cornell University and Caltech are collaborating to create petascale simulations of merging black holes and neutron stars. The primary goal of co-PIs Saul Teukolsky and Lawrence Kidder are to use Blue Waters to support and improve the ability of Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory to extract from information from observed gravitational waves. Philip F. Hopkins, a PI at Caltech, will carry out novel research of galaxy formation by running cosmological simulations on Blue Waters, targeting galaxies from the faintest dwarfs through the Milky Way, at ultra-high resolution. Nickolay Gnedin, University of Chicago, plans to explore the physical mechanisms for turnovers at the end of faint galaxies using petascale simulation; Dinshaw Balsara at the University of Notre Dame will test theories of star formations by carrying out simulations using Blue Waters; and Jerry Draayer, Louisiana State University, aims to use Blue Waters in advancing the first-principle symmetry-guided nuclear modeling for studies nucleosynthesis and fundamental symmetries in nature.

Paul Woodward, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, will continue to build on earlier work with Blue Waters to simulate convective-reactive nucelosynthesis. A Blue Waters allocation will allow Shantenu Jha, Rutgers University, to characterize and understand glutamate binding to the N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor (NMDAr) on a macromolecular system using the system’s advanced simulation capabilities.

Great Lakes Consortium Awards

Member institutions of the GLCPC include universities and colleges, national laboratories, the Southeastern Universities Research Association, educational foundations, and K-12 school districts who are developing educational and workforce development programs to help realize the full potential of petascale computing.

Nine research teams are awarded computational time, storage and support on Blue Waters this year through this peer-reviewed allocation method, including projects that map and model the vegetation of the Great Lakes Basin; simulating the atmosphere during and after a wildfire; and using a framework to look at potential policy responses to climate change. The nine teams will use approximately 4.6 million node hours (about 147 million core hour equivalents) from now until May 31, 2018.

The GLCPC consortium has been part of the Blue Waters project for the past nine years and makes annual peer-reviewed allocations on the Blue Waters supercomputer to research projects from GLCPC member institutions.

Full list of 2017-18 projects and investigators:

• Claude-Andre Faucher-Giguere, Northwestern University: Pushing the Dynamic Range: Simulating the Co-Evolution of Galaxies and Black Holes
• Yongyang Cai, Ohio State University: Policy Responses to Climate Change in a Dynamic Stochastic Economy
• Said Elghobashi, University of California, Irvine: Dispersion of Fully Resolved Liquid Droplets in Isotropic Turbulent Flow
• John F. Hawley, University of Virginia: Tilted Disks around Black Holes: Elucidating the Alignment Mechanism
• Venkat Raman, University of Michigan: Highly-Scalable Open-Source Solvers for Turbulent Combustion
• Jennifer Corcoran, University of Minnesota: Image Processing to Build a Multi-Temporal Vegetation Elevation Model (MTVEM) of Great Lakes Basin
• Eric Johnsen, University of Michigan: Numerical Simulations of Collapsing Cavitation Bubbles
• Dinshaw Balsara, Notre Dame: Towards a Resilient CAF and MPI-4 Programming Paradigm and Studying Two-Fluid Electrodynamic and MHD Processes
• Marshall Stageberg, Michigan State University: Simulating the Atmospheric Response to a Wildland Fire using a Cloud-Resolving Model

To see all current Blue Waters projects, visit: https://bluewaters.ncsa.illinois.edu/science-teams.

For more information on the GLCPC, visit: http://www.greatlakesconsortium.org/.

About NCSA

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign provides supercomputing and advanced digital resources for the nation’s science enterprise. At NCSA, University of Illinois faculty, staff, students, and collaborators from around the globe use advanced digital resources to address research grand challenges for the benefit of science and society. NCSA has been advancing one third of the Fortune 50 for more than 30 years by bringing industry, researchers, and students together to solve grand challenges at rapid speed and scale.

About NCSA’s Blue Waters Project

NCSA’s Blue Waters petascale supercomputer is one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, and is the fastest supercomputer on a university campus. Blue Waters uses hundreds of thousands of computational cores to achieve peak performance of more than 13 quadrillion calculations per second. Blue Waters has more memory and faster data storage than any other open system in the world. Scientists and engineers across the country use the computing and data power of Blue Waters to tackle a wide range of challenges. Recent advances that were not possible without these resources include computationally designing the first set of antibody prototypes to detect the Ebola virus, simulating the HIV capsid, visualizing the formation of the first galaxies and exploding stars, and understanding how the layout of a city can impact supercell thunderstorms.

---

Source: NCSA