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Supercomputer Simulations Reveal Details of Galaxy Clusters

Inspired by the science fiction of the spacefaring Romulans of Star Trek, astrophysicists have developed cosmological computer simulations called RomulusC, where the ‘C’ stands for galaxy cluster. With a focus on black hole physics, RomulusC has produced some of the highest resolution simulations ever of galaxy clusters, which can contain hundreds or even thousands of galaxies. “We find that there’s a substantial amount of this cool-warm gas in galaxy clusters,” said study co-author Iryna Butsky, a PhD Student at the University of Washington. “We see that this cool-warm gas traces at extremely different and complementary structures compared to the hot gas. And we also predict that this cool-warm component can be observed now with existing instruments like the Hubble Space Telescope mass spectrograph.” Researchers used the Comet supercomputer at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SCSC) at UC San Diego, the Stampede2 system at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), Blue Waters at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and NASA’s Pleiades system.

• https://www.sdsc.edu/News%20Items/PR20200124_galaxy_clusters.html

Simulations reveal galaxy clusters details

Inspired by the science fiction of the spacefaring Romulans of Star Trek, astrophysicists have used XSEDE-allocated supercomputers to develop cosmological computer simulations called RomulusC, where the 'C' stands for galaxy cluster. With a focus on black hole physics, RomulusC has produced some of the highest resolution simulations ever of galaxy clusters, which can contain hundreds or even thousands of galaxies.

• https://phys.org/news/2020-01-simulations-reveal-galaxy-clusters.html
• https://insidehpc.com/2020/02/podcast-simulating-galaxy-clusters-with-xsede-supercomputers/

HPC Wire taps work of two Blue Waters researchers

The trade journal HPC wire tapped Jon Calhoun and Luke Olson in its December 2019 report on notable new research on high-performance computing community and its related domains. In their paper, "FaultSight: A Fault Analysis Tool for HPC Researchers", the authors present a fault injection analysis tool that they claim can efficiently assist in analyzing HPC application reliability and resilience scheme effectiveness. Calhoun, a former Blue Waters graduate fellow who is an assistant professor at Clemson, and Olson, a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, wrote the paper with Einar Horn and Dakota Fulp. "FaulrSight" was one of six papers presented at 2019 Workshop on Fault Tolerance for HPC at eXtreme Scale, which took place within the Supecomputing 2019 annual conference, better known as SC '19.

• https://www.hpcwire.com/2019/12/18/whats-new-in-hpc-research-particle-accelerators-brain-science-the-supercomputing-institute-more/
• https://sc19.supercomputing.org/proceedings/workshops/workshop_files/ws_ftxs109s2-file1.pdf
• https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8945875

Supercomputing Sediment Transport in Estuaries

In this video, Salme Cook from the University of New Hampshire describes how she is using NCSA’s Blue Waters supercomputer to model estuaries.

• https://insidehpc.com/tag/sediment-transport/

Blue Waters graduate fellow earns distinction for thesis

The University of Michigan’s Rackham Graduate School recognized Erin Teich’s doctoral dissertation as one of the 20 best published by its 2018 graduates. In the thesis, “Local Structure in Hard Particle Self-Assembly and Assembly Failure”, Teich investigated local structure in systems of anisotropic particles mediated exclusively by entropy maximization. Specifically, she explored the role of local structure in crystallization and its failure by tackling two related lines of inquiry. Wrote Teich as she introduced the first line of inquiry: “First, I study the interplay between particle shape and spherical confinement in systems of hard polyhedral particles, to examine locally dense clusters of anisotropic particles and their possible connection to preferred local structures during unconfined self-assembly. I use Monte Carlo simulation methods to find putative densest clusters of the Platonic solids in spherical confinement, for up to N = 60 constituent particles.” The thesis was among the 10 that the Michigan Society of Fellows deemed worthy of honorable mention after reviewing faculty-nominated works for the Rackham Graduate School’s distinguished dissertation award. The Society of Fellows selected the 10 best as winners of the award.

• https://rackham.umich.edu/discover-rackham/proquest-distinguished-dissertation-award-winners-4/
• https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/handle/2027.42/147721

CalTech Researcher Uses Blue Waters to Model Galactic Atmospheres

By employing their Enhanced Halo Resolution modeling technique on Blue Waters, one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, Hummels and his research team are able to, more accurately than ever before, account for cool hydrogen gas that is spewed into galactic outskirts in vast quantities following galaxy formation.

• https://www.hpcwire.com/off-the-wire/caltech-researcher-uses-blue-waters-to-model-galactic-atmospheres/
• https://www.rdmag.com/news/2019/02/researcher-uses-blue-waters-supercomputer-model-galactic-atmospheres

The Giant Planets in the Solar System Stunted the Growth of Mars

For centuries, astronomers and scientists have sought to understand how our Solar System came to be. Since that time, two theories have become commonly-accepted that explain how it formed and evolved over time. These are the Nebular Hypothesis and the Nice Model, respectively. Whereas the former contends that the Sun and planets formed from a large cloud of dust and gas, the latter maintains the giant planets have migrated since their formation. This is what has led to the Solar System as we know it today. However, an enduring mystery about these theories is how Mars came to be the way it is. Why, for example, is it significantly smaller than Earth and inhospitable to life as we know it when all indications show that it should be comparable in size? According to a new study by an international team of scientists, the migration of the giant planets could have been what made the difference. As Matt Clement, a graduate student in the HL Dodge Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Oklahoma and the lead author on the paper, explained to Universe Today via email: “In the model, the giant planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune) originally formed much closer to the Sun. In order to reach their current orbital locations, the entire solar system undergoes a period of orbital instability. During this unstable period, the size and the shape of the giant planet’s orbits change rapidly.” For the sake of their study, which was recently published in the scientific journal Icarus under the title “Mars Growth Stunted by an Early Giant Planet Instability“, the team expanded on the Nice Model. Through a series of dynamical simulations, they attempted to show how, during the early Solar System, the growth of Mars was halted thanks to the orbital instabilities of the giant planets.

• https://www.universetoday.com/139194/the-giant-planets-in-the-solar-system-stunted-the-growth-of-mars/
• https://sciencetrends.com/what-is-behind-mars-stunted-growth/

University of Oklahoma astrophysics team explains Mars’ stunted growth

A University of Oklahoma astrophysics team explains why the growth of Mars was stunted by an orbital instability among the outer solar system’s giant planets in a new study on the evolution of the young solar system. The OU study builds on the widely-accepted Nice Model, which invokes a planetary instability to explain many peculiar observed aspects of the outer solar system. An OU model used computer simulations to show how planet accretion (growth) is halted by the outer solar system instability. Without it, Mars possibly could have become a larger, habitable planet like Earth. “This study offers a simple and more elegant solution for why Mars is small, barren and uninhabitable,” said Matthew S. Clement, OU graduate student in the Homer L. Dodge Department of Physics and Astronomy, OU College of Arts and Sciences.

• http://www.ou.edu/publicaffairs/archives/2018/may/OUStudyExplainsWhyMarsGrowthStunted
• https://phys.org/news/2018-05-mars-growth-stunted.html
• http://www.sciencenewsline.com/news/2018050721040089.html

Statistics in Defense and National Security Section News for May 2018

The ASA’s Section on Statistics in Defense and National Security (SDNS) sponsored the student poster prize session at the Conference on Data Analysis (CoDA), which took place in Santa Fe, New Mexico, March 7–9. The prize has become a major feature of CoDA and is a great way to introduce students to the section. The conference highlights data-driven problems of interest to the Department of Energy. Talks and posters feature research from the Department of Energy national laboratories, academia, and industry. There were 28 students presenting posters, and three prizes were awarded to the following students: First Prize, $400: Lauren M. Foster, Colorado School of Mines for "When Does Uncertainty Matter While Modeling Climate Change in Mountain Headwaters? Contrasting Model Resolution and Complexity Under a Changing Climate in an Alpine Catchment".

• http://magazine.amstat.org/blog/2018/05/01/snds2018/

Why Mars Turned Into A Planetary Runt

Mars has long tantalized humanity as a potential astrobiological haven, but its fate as a planetary runt and a long-shot for life as we know it may have been sealed from its earliest formation. At least, that’s the implication of a new paper appearing in the journal Icarus. “Mars is believed to be geologically older than Earth, yet [both] formed out of the same material very close to each other,” Matthew Clement, the paper’s lead author and a graduate researcher in planetary science at the University of Oklahoma, told me. “Therefore, when the solar system was very young, Mars grew to its present size in just a few million years and for some reason stopped getting bigger.” All the while Earth and Venus continued to grow bigger for another 100 million years or so, says Clement. The crux of the paper, however, is that the leading model used to explain the instabilities, orbits, and dynamics of the early outer solar system, can also be used to explain the makeup of our current inner solar system. That is, if such instabilities occurred while the inner planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars) were still forming. ---- In the paper, Clement and colleagues use 800 dynamical computer simulations to show that an early instability in the outer solar system strongly influences terrestrial planet formation. Their results also consistently produce present-day Mars’ analogs (or rocky planets about half the diameter of Earth). “Large embryos are either ejected or scattered inward toward Earth and Venus (in some cases to deliver water), and Mars is left behind as a stranded embryo ,” the authors write.

• https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucedorminey/2018/04/22/why-mars-turned-into-a-planetary-runt/#7b11a5273e41

NCSA releases 2017 Blue Waters Project Annual Report Detailing Innovative Research and Scientific Breakthroughs

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.

• http://illinois.edu/emailer/newsletter/147425.html

UIUC’s Supercomputer Has a Projected $1B Impact On Illinois’ Economy

Nestled on the outskirts of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign campus — at the corner of Oak Street and St. Mary’s Road — is Blue Waters, a supercomputer that was first instituted as a result of a 2007 National Science Foundation grant and an initial $60 million investment from the State of Illinois. A report released this past week on the economic impact of this supercomputer — on the UIUC campus, its five surrounding counties, as well as nationwide spillover effects — puts a whole new meaning to the term “return on investment.”

• https://www.americaninno.com/chicago/uiucs-supercomputer-has-a-projected-1b-impact-on-illinois-economy/

Blue Waters Graduate Fellow: Andrew Kirby

I am studying Mechanical Engineering at the University of Wyoming. I research numerical methods for computational fluid dynamics (CFD). My research is in the field of CFD. Specifically, I develop numerical solvers for the Navier-Stokes equations which govern fluid dynamics. I apply these methods that I develop to applications in wind energy and aerospace. We hope to simulate entire wind farm systems to determine properties such as power and thrust of the wind turbines and how their interactions interplay with each other. CFD also allows you to visualize your results. It gives a nice feedback loop on seeing you results (that are usually really cool to look at too). Lately, I have been really interested in the high performance computing aspect as well. I really enjoy trying to write really fast and efficient code that runs on the largest supercomputers in the world.

• http://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/news/story/blue_waters_graduate_fellow_andrew_kirby

Blue Waters Graduate Fellow: Sean Seyler

Proteins, such as membrane transporters or enzymes, are much like nanomachines that undergo structural changes—conformational transitions—between multiple states in order to perform chemical or mechanical work. These transitions are rare events that, due to the equilibrium sampling problem, are difficult to reproduce in equilibrium molecular dynamics (MD) simulation. The paradigm for studying these processes is the so-called structure-function connection; in principle, one should be able to infer a protein's function (its dynamical structural changes) given information about its structure (its 3D "shape" and amino acid sequence). Given the enormous computational difficulty of simulating highly complex, heterogeneous biomacromolecules on sufficiently long time scale, the majority of my research is focused on the development of computational methods and software tools that can help to more effectively sample and quantify protein conformational motions and transitions.

• http://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/news/story/blue_waters_graduate_fellow_sean_seyler

Blue Waters pushes magnetic reconnection research

Magnetic reconnection is the scientific process in which oppositely aligned magnetic field lines in a plasma break and form new connections. The newly connected magnetic fields are bent and have a tension that can accelerate the plasma like a slingshot. This process is still not well-understood, but base knowledge is the energy released from the magnetic field accelerates the particles in the plasma during reconnection. Plasma jets, and more generally, plasma, is an important subject in high-energy-density laboratory astrophysics. "Plasma is the most abundant form of ordinary (non-dark) matter in the universe, so understanding plasmas is necessary for understanding systems in astrophysics," said Sam Totorica, NCSA Blue Waters Graduate Fellow from Stanford University.

• http://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/news/story/blue_waters_pushes_magnetic_reconnection_research

Blue Waters Graduate Fellow: Sherwood Richers

My primary interest in neutrino transport has a couple of objectives. Let's look at core-collapse supernovae first. The big problem in this field is that observers watch stars explode on a daily basis, but when we put the most complete set of physics possible in the largest simulations running on supercomputers (like Blue Waters), they don't consistently explode. Something is missing, and that something might be a proper treatment of neutrino transport. The equations describing neutrino transport are notoriously difficult to simulate, so they have to be heavily approximated, but I am trying to remove as much of the approximation as I can.

• http://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/news/story/blue_waters_graduate_fellow_sherwood_richers

Blue Waters Graduate Fellow: Ronald Stenz

For my research, I am trying to determine the impacts that precipitation centrifuging has on tornado dynamics. I have always been fascinated with severe weather and tornadoes, which inspired me to study atmospheric sciences. I am studying this particular topic because in numerical simulations of tornadoes, an unrealistic rain blob appears in the core of simulated tornadoes. My goal is to make these simulations more realistic with a centrifuging algorithm, and to determine the resulting effect on tornado dynamics. Since gathering accurate and dense observations around a tornado is incredibly difficult and dangerous, numerical modeling is a major tool used to understand tornadoes. For my research I use a model called CM1 to numerically simulate tornadoes so we can study how they form, what environments they form in, and what factors lead to intensification or weakening of tornadoes.

• http://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/news/story/ronald_stenz

Blue Waters Graduate Fellow: Michael Howard

The goals of my research are two-fold: (1) to develop massively parallel software for doing simulations of multiphase/complex fluids, and (2) to use this software to study enhanced oil recovery. I first plan to implement a developed algorithm for doing these types of simulations (multiparticle collision dynamics—MPCD) on GPUs. GPU acceleration will allow us to study problems at realistic length and time scales. To date, there has only been limited public availability of these types of codes, and so I plan to release the software open-source. I will then apply my software to study the initial stages of enhanced oil recovery—the process by which additional oil is extracted from geological formations.

• http://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/news/story/blue_waters_graduate_fellow_michael_howard

Blue Waters Graduate Fellow: Elizabeth Agee

My research is focused on the interactions between forest ecosystems and hydrology. Over 50% of global evapotranspiration comes from forested ecosystems, so this represents a significant pathway for understanding global water and energy cycling. The question that drives my research is how these pathways will respond to climate change. Using Blue Waters, I will explore how tree species in the Amazon rainforest use water in different ways and how those differences influence community resilience to drought events. It is my hope that this work will improve the representation of tropical forests in the current suite of land surface models and provide mechanistic insights into forest community dynamics.

• http://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/news/story/elizabeth_agee

How layout of urban areas affect supercell thunderstorms

Many things go into consideration when planning a city layout, roads, transportation needs, location relative to natural features. However, one thing has not previously been considered is the shape of the city and how that shape affects the severity of natural disasters, such as extreme thunderstorms or tornadoes. With the help of Blue Waters at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Larissa Reames, a Ph.D student at the University of Oklahoma and a 2015-2016 NCSA Blue Waters Graduate Fellow, is undertaking exciting meteorology research on the effects of supercell thunderstorms and how the specific layout of a city can affect a storm’s impact.

• http://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/news/story/how_layout_of_urban_areas_affect_supercell_thunderstorms

Blue Waters Graduate Fellow: Paul Hime

advances in genome sequencing technologies have opened up exciting new avenues for phylogeneticists to survey broad swaths of the genome and to untangle some of the difficult branches in the Tree of Life. This new flood of genetic data itself is necessary, but not sufficient, to answer some of the most thorny evolutionary questions. As the amount of data available to evolutionary biologists has expanded, so too have the computational challenges to appropriately modeling DNA evolution between organisms. My doctoral research in the Weisrock Lab at University of Kentucky uses new computational and statistical approaches to reconstruct evolutionary relationships. I utilize amphibians (frogs, salamanders, and caecilians) as a model system in which to explore these exciting questions. Access to extremely powerful supercomputing resources is vital to this research, and the Blue Waters Fellowship through the NCSA provides unprecedented opportunities to advance this work. ... the NSF-funded Blue Waters supercomputer will allow me to probe aspects of phylogenetics which have previously been inaccessible due to computational constraints.

• http://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/news/story/paul_hime

Blue Waters Graduate Fellow: Erin Teich

Very generally, what we study in our labs is a process called self-assembly. And this is relevant for a lot of different processes, but it turns out that material on a variety of scales basically self-organizes. This allows for the creation of materials by basically harnessing the urge that things have on certain temperature and energy scales in order to self-organize. They do that because they want to minimize their free energy. For the Blue Waters Fellowship, I'll be looking at disordered materials via simulation. There are materials called glasses, which is just like everyday glass, and amazingly enough, they are still not well understood. Physicists have been studying glass for decades and decades, and really centuries if you think about it, and physical properties of glasses still aren't well understood; like how glasses form, and whether or not that's a phase transition. So with the Blue Waters Fellowship, I'll be simulating glass formation in colloidal systems on the microscale, and trying to uncover, if possible, some of the reasons why glass formation happens in those types of systems.

• http://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/news/story/erin_teich

Blue Waters Graduate Fellow: Iryna Butsky

I really enjoyed my research on galactic magnetic fields, and I wanted to pursue it further. I'm very interested in studying the contribution of cosmic rays to the turbulent dynamo which amplifies galactic magnetic fields. Cosmic rays are tricky to model in galaxy simulations and have thus oftentimes been ignored. However, they could be key to the explanation of the strength of observed field strengths.

• http://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/news/story/iryna_butsky

Extreme-scale Graph Analysis on Blue Waters

In this video from the 2016 Blue Waters Symposium, George Slota from Pennsylvania State University presents: Extreme-scale Graph Analysis on Blue Waters.

• http://insidehpc.com/2016/08/extreme-scale-graph-analysis-on-blue-waters/

Ten PhD students from across the country selected as Blue Waters Graduate Fellows

Ten outstanding computational science PhD students from across the country have been selected to receive Blue Waters Graduate Fellowships for 2016-2017. The fellowship program, now in its third year, provides substantial support and the opportunity to leverage the petascale power of National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois’s Blue Waters supercomputer to advance their research. The awards are made to outstanding PhD graduate students who have decided to incorporate high performance computing and data analysis into their research.

• http://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/news/story/ten_phd_students_from_across_the_country_selected_as_blue_waters_graduate_f

Six PhD students from across the country selected as Blue Waters Graduate Fellows

Six outstanding computational science PhD students from across the country have been selected to receive Blue Waters Graduate Fellowships for 2015-2016. The fellowship program, now in its second year, provides graduate students in diverse fields with substantial support and the opportunity to leverage the petascale power of NCSA’s Blue Waters supercomputer to advance their research.

• http://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/news/story/six_phd_students_from_across_the_country_selected_as_blue_waters_gradu

Four additional students named Blue Waters Graduate Fellows

Four additional computational science PhD students have been selected to receive Blue Waters Graduate Fellowships, which provide graduate students in diverse fields with substantial support and the opportunity to leverage the petascale power of NCSA’s Blue Waters supercomputer to advance their research. Six graduate fellows were named earlier this spring. Because of the large number of qualified applicants, NCSA sought and was awarded additional fellowship funding from the National Science Foundation, enabling the Blue Waters project to support a total of 10 graduate fellows.

• http://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/news/story/four_additional_students_named_blue_waters_graduate_fellows

Six PhD students from across the country selected as Blue Waters Graduate Fellows

Six outstanding computational science PhD students from across the country have been selected to receive the first Blue Waters Graduate Fellowships, which provide graduate students in diverse fields with substantial support and the opportunity to leverage the petascale power of NCSA’s Blue Waters supercomputer to advance their research. Over three years this fellowship program will award more than $1 million and nearly 30 million integer-core hours to support graduate research.

• http://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/news/story/six_phd_students_from_across_the_country_selected_as_blue_waters_graduate_f