Strategic Communications and Marketing News Bureau

Illinois researchers awarded computing time on NCSA’s Blue Waters

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.

Read Next

Life sciences Photo of Michael Ward standing in tall grass on a riverbank.

How are migrating wild birds affected by H5N1 infection in the U.S.?

Each spring, roughly 3.5 billion wild birds migrate from their warm winter havens to their breeding grounds across North America, eating insects, distributing plant seeds and providing a variety of other ecosystem services to stopping sites along the way. Some also carry diseases like avian influenza, a worry for agricultural, environmental and public health authorities. […]

Announcements Marcelo Garcia, professor of civil and environmental engineering at The Grainger College of Engineering.

Illinois faculty member elected to National Academy of Engineering

Champaign, Ill. — Marcelo Garcia, a professor of civil and environmental engineering in The Grainger College of Engineering, has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering.

Social sciences Male and female student embracing on the quad with flowering redbud tree and the ACES library in the background. Photo by Michelle Hassel

Dating is not broken, but the trajectories of relationships have changed

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — According to some popular culture writers and online posts by discouraged singles lamenting their inability to find romantic partners, dating is “broken,” fractured by the social isolation created by technology, pandemic lockdowns and potential partners’ unrealistic expectations. Yet two studies of college students conducted a decade apart found that their ideas about […]

Strategic Communications and Marketing News Bureau

507 E. Green St
MC-426
Champaign, IL 61820

Email: stratcom@illinois.edu

Phone (217) 333-5010