URBANA, Ill., Nov. 9, 2017 — The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign released today the 2017 Blue Waters Project Annual Report. For the project’s fourth annual report, research teams were invited to present highlights from their research that leveraged Blue Waters, the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) most powerful system for sustained computation and data analysis. Spanning economics to engineering, geoscience to space science, Blue Waters has accelerated research and impact across an enormous range of science and engineering disciplines throughout its more than 4-year history covered by the report series. This year is no different.
“To date, the NSF Blue Waters Project has provided over 20 billion core-hour equivalents to science, engineering and research projects, supported not just by the NSF, but also by NIH, NASA, DOE, NOAA, and other funders. Without Blue Waters, these funded investigations might not even be possible,” said Blue Waters Director and Principal Investigator, Dr. William “Bill” Kramer. “In this year’s report, we are using a ‘badge’ to show the projects that are Data-intensive (39 projects), GPU-accelerated (34), Large Scale greater than 1,000 nodes (65), Memory-intensive (18), Only on Blue Waters (27), Multi-physics/multi-scale (47), Machine learning (9), Communication-intensive (32) and Industry (5). This shows the breadth and depth of the uses world-class science is making on Blue Waters.”
“I continue to be amazed by the vast range of creative, limit-pushing research that scientists submit to this publication year after year. With the support of the National Science Foundation and the University of Illinois, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications’ Blue Waters Project continues to empower scientists to make discoveries that have immense impact in a diverse range of fields, spark new understanding of our world, and open new avenues for future research,” said Dr. William “Bill” Gropp, Director of NCSA.
The annual report also highlights the Blue Waters Project’s strong focus on education and outreach. Blue Waters provides the equivalent of 60 million core-hours of the system’s computational capacity each year for educational projects, including seminars, courseware development, courses, workshops, institutes, internships, and fellowships. To date, there have been more than 200 approved education, outreach, and training projects from organizations across the country. These allocations have directly benefitted over 3,700 individuals in learning about different aspects of computational and data-enabled science and engineering at more than 160 institutions, including 41 institutions in EPSCoR jurisdictions and at 14 Minority Serving Institutions.
The Blue Waters Annual Report highlights how the project is helping other domain specialists reach petascale sustained performance, specifically through their recently-expanded Petascale Application Improvement Discovery (PAID) program, where the Project provided millions of dollars to science teams and computational and data experts to improve the performance of applications.
Gropp continued, “Even more remarkable breakthroughs will be forthcoming as NCSA continues to partner with scientists around the nation to change the world as we know it.”
This year’s annual report features 130 research abstracts from various allocation types, categorized by space science, geoscience, physics and engineering, biology, chemistry, and social science, economics, health.
This year’s annual report features 130 research abstracts from various allocation types, categorized by space science, computer science, geoscience, physics and engineering, biology, chemistry, and health, and social science, economics, and humanities. Click here to download the full report.
Read the original release in full here: http://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/news/story/ncsa_releases_2017_blue_waters_project_annual_report_detailing_innovative_r
Source: NCSA