Twenty-four U. of I. research teams have been awarded allocations on the National Center for Supercomputing Applications’ Blue Waters, the most powerful supercomputer on a university campus.
“The U. of I. is a tremendous university with plenty of talented people who can take effective advantage of a resource like Blue Waters,” said Blue Waters project director Bill Kramer. “It’s important for the project that our home institution has a close relationship with this great supercomputer, and we look forward to seeing more groundbreaking science come from the researchers at Illinois.”
General Awards
Projects selected for general allocations fall under a wide umbrella of scientific fields, and can typically be granted between 30,000 to 1 million node-hours per proposal. The following scientists and researchers have been granted general awards.
Astronomy and Astrophysics
- Stuart Shapiro (physics), Vasileios Paschalidis and Milton Ruiz – “Gravitational and Electromagnetic Signatures of Compact Binary Mergers: General Relativistic Simulations at the Petascale,” 990,000 node-hours.
- Paul Ricker (astronomy) and Yinghe Lu – “Effects of Active Galaxy Feedback on the Evolution of Galaxy Clusters,” 100,000 node-hours.
Molecular Dynamics
- Aleksei Aksimentiev (physics) – “The Molecular Mechanism of Transport Selectivity across the Nuclear Pore Complex,” 986,000 node-hours.
- Narayana Aluru (mechanical science and engineering) – “Large-scale Simulation of Droplet Interface Bilayers with Functional Protein Channels,” 975,000 node-hours.
Material Science
- Huck Beng Chew (aerospace engineering) and Abhilash Harpale – “Controlled Patterning of Multilayer Graphene by Hydrogen-Plasma Treatment,” 280,000 node-hours.
- Jean Paul Allain and Michael Lively – “Harnessing Petascale Computing to Elucidate Fundamental Mechanisms Driving Nanopatterning of Multicomponent Surfaces by Directed Irradiation Synthesis,” 250,000 node-hours.
- Huck Beng Chew (aerospace engineering) and Haoran Wang – “Mechanics of Deformation in High Capacity Lithium-Ion Batteries,” 240,000 node-hours.
Geoscience
- Albert Valocchi (civil and environmental engineering) and Yu Chen – “Pore-Scale Simulation of Multiphase Flow in Porous Media with Applications to Geological Sequestration of Carbon Dioxide,” 250,000 node-hours.
- Marcelo H. Garcia (civil and environmental engineering), Paul Fischer and Som Dutta – “Large Eddy Simulation of Sediment Transport and Hydrodynamics at River Bifurcations: Using a Highly Scalable Spectral Element-based CFD Solver,” 200,000 node-hours.
Biology and Genomics
- Tandy Warnow (computer science) – “High Performance Methods for Big Data Phylogenomics, Proteomics and Metagenomics,” 125,000 node-hours.
- Revathi Jambunathan and Deborah Levin (aerospace engineering) – “Modeling Flows through Porous Media with a Kinetic Hybrid CPU-GPU Computational Tool,” 100,000 node-hours.
Neuroscience Biology
- Bradley P. Sutton (bioengineering), Curtis L. Johnson, Alex M. Cerjanic, Aaron Anderson and Joseph L. Holtrop – “GPU-Based Approaches for High-Resolution, Quantitative MRI Applications,” 100,000 node-hours.
High Energy and Nuclear Physics
- Mark Neubauer (physics) – “Enabling Discoveries at the Large Hadron Collider through Advanced Computation,” 50,000 node-hours.
Engineering
- Seid Koric (NCSA) and Robert Lucas – “Improving Virtually Guided Certification for Product Design with Implicit FEA Solver in LS-DYNA,” 25,000 node-hours.
Computer Visualization
- Donna Cox (Art and Design), Robert Patterson, Stuart Levy and Kalina Borkiewicz – “The CADENS Blue Waters Visualization Project,” 300,000 node-hours.
Exploratory Awards
The following scientists and researchers have been granted exploratory awards, which designate between 20,000-50,000 node-hours per proposal, and are unrenewable, six-month allocations.
- Ange-Therese Akono and Erman Guleryuz – “Multiscale and Multiphysics Modeling of Geopolymer Cements Composites,” 50,000 node-hours.
- Ahmed Elbanna and Thanh Nguyen – “Multiscale Modeling of Biofilm Dynamics in Drinking Water Distribution Systems: Towards Predictive Modeling of Pathogen Outbreaks,” 50,000 node-hours.
- Paolo Gardoni and Roberto Guidotti – “3-D Probabilistic Physics-based Hazard Maps via Petascale simulations,” 50,000 node-hours.
- Stephen Long, Deepak Jaiswal and Yu Wang – “3-D Simulations of Plant Growth at the Global Scale,” 50,000 node-hours.
- Ryan Sriver and Hui Li – “Assessing CESM Scalability for Hierarchical Model Ensembles,” 50,000 node-hours.
- Ahmed Taha, Seid Koric, Sudhakar Pamidighantam, Narayan Aluru and Gabrielle Allen – “Advanced Digital Technology for Materials and Manufacturing,” 50,000 node-hours.
- Caroline Riedl, Vincent Andrieux and Matthias Grosse Perdekamp – “Mapping Proton Quark Structure in Momentum and Coordinate Phase Space using 17 PB of COMPASS Data,” 40,000 node-hours.
- Prashant Jain, Sudhakar Pamidighantam and Daniel Dumett – “Electronic Structure Investigations of Semiconductor Nanocrystal Doping,” 30,000 node-hours.
- Levent Gurel and Wen-Mei Hwu – “Parallelization of the Multilevel Fast Multipole Algorithm (MLFMA) on Heterogeneous CPU-GPU Architectures (Part II),” 12,500 node-hours.
The next Illinois allocation proposal due date is Sept. 15, 2016. Researchers based at Illinois who are interested in submitting proposals to use Blue Waters can find relevant information – including terms of use, examples of past successful proposals, Blue Waters specifications and links to the proposal submission site – at https://bluewaters.ncsa.illinois.edu/illinois-allocations.
