Discovering information in unstructured data is a major research topic today because it underlies everything from web-search engines to finding recommendations for movies and restaurants. At the University of Texas at Austin, Dr. Keshav Pingali, the W.A. “Tex” Moncrief Chair of Grid and Distributed Computing, leads a team of scientists who use supercomputers at the…
Using Supercomputers to Identify Synthesizeable Photocatalysts for Greenhouse CO2 Gas Reduction
Testing nearly 69,000 materials for specific properties was the challenge faced by scientists conducting extensive research on using photocatalytic conversion to reduce the greenhouse gas CO2. The main goal is to find a way to reduce CO2 into chemicals that can provide a source of clean, low-cost renewable energy. But researchers have located very few…
Supercomputers Help Uncover the Mysteries of Black Hole Tidal Disruption Events
Challenges for Future Astrophysics Research There are still a number of challenges for future astrophysics research in areas such as black hole accretion that will require using increasingly powerful supercomputers. According to Fragile, “We would still like to cover orders of magnitude larger spatial domains and orders of magnitude longer time intervals. That’s going to…
Speeding CERN LHC Research with HPC Systems and ALCF Workflow Optimizations
At CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, physicists and engineers are probing the fundamental laws of the universe using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator. The LHC collides protons and researchers measure the aftermath to test the predictions of the Standard Model, which has been the leading…
Extending High Accuracy Quantum Chemistry Calculations with HPC
Researchers at the Argonne National Laboratory recently performed the largest, and most accurate calculation of a metal organic framework system that was ever done. What made this possible was the Theta supercomputer at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) with the latest generation processors that incorporated extra memory on the chip to aid in memory…
Nanoparticle Research Provides New Applications for Industry and Everyday Life
Nanoparticles, a bridge between bulk materials and atomic or molecular structures, are used in a wide variety of physical and scientific research. Nanoparticle research provides new applications both for industry and everyday life. A team at the University of Texas (UT) at Austin is doing interdisciplinary research to innovate optical nanotechnologies in health, energy, manufacturing and…
Largest Supercomputer Simulation of Sumatra-Andaman Earthquake
The December 2004 Sumatra-Andaman earthquake was one of the most powerful and destructive seismic events in history. Failure of 1300–1500 km of the Sumatra subduction zone caused more than eight minutes of violent shaking. The resulting Mw 9.1–9.3 megathrust earthquake generated a tsunami that was up to 30m high along the northern coast of Sumatra. The…
Supercomputers Aid in Breakthrough Cytochrome C Oxidase Research
There are many important proteins in nature, but arguably one of the most important is ATP synthase, the protein responsible for production of ATP, the cell’s primary source of chemical energy. Think of it as the gas that drives a car; ATP drives most cellular chemical and physical processes. Prior to the generation of ATP,…
Particle-in-cell Plasma Simulation Using Supercomputers Enhances Computational Physics
Modern Quantum Chemistry Research Possible Because of Supercomputers, HPC Software
This seventh and final installment in the Modernizing Chemistry Code series covers how scientists are updating popular molecular dynamics, quantum chemistry and quantum materials code to take advantage of hardware advances, such as the Intel Xeon Phi processor. “In our group, we use computational chemistry methods to study physical and chemical processes in biochemical systems,”…