Institute for Advanced Computing Applications and Technologies

On Dec. 16, 2010, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) released and discussed its “Designing a Digital Future: Federally Funded Research and Development in Networking and Information Technology.” This congressionally-mandated report assesses the status and direction of the Federal Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) Program. Illinois computer scientist Bill Gropp was among the authors of the report, which is available as a PDF.

Illinois biophysicist Klaus Schulten had been studying some unusual chemical reactions that can be affected by magnetism. He realized that if similar reactions took place in living things, it might enable them to detect magnetism.

The 7th International Workshop on OpenMP (IWOMP 2011) will be held June 13-15, 2011, in Chicago. Submissions are sought of previously unpublished technical papers detailing innovative, original research and development related to OpenMP. Papers of 12 pages or fewer should be submitted by Jan. 31, 2011. Proceedings will be published in Springer Verlag's LNCS series. For details, see www.iwomp.org.

A team of University of Illinois students has earned third place in the Green 500 list for energy-efficient supercomputing with a 33 teraflop GPU system that was also dubbed the competition’s "greenest self-built cluster." The Illinois entry finished behind two goliaths -- a prototype system from IBM and Japan’s top supercomputer.

At the SC10 supercomputing conference, high-performance computing experts, including Illinois' Bill Gropp and Marc Snir, debated whether the industry will hit an exaflop before the end of the decade and, if so, whether the achievement will have been worth the massive expense.

An Illinois team headed by computer science professor Laxmikant Kale is helping scientists tune their applications for Blue Waters, even before the hardware exists. 

Graphics processing units are being hailed as computational accelerators. In order to accurately determine how much of a speedup GPUs provide, Illinois researcher Klaus Schulten ran NAMD calculations on NCSA's Lincoln cluster (a hybrid of CPUs and GPUs) both with and without the GPUs. For this particularly complicated simulation—the ribosome's production of a polypeptide and its subsequent threading through the translocation channel of a cell membrane—the researchers achieved about a fourfold speedup with two GPUs and eight CPUs in the cluster.

IACAT researcher Klaus Schulten, director of the Theoretical & Computational Biophysics Group, cautions that an intimate understanding of biomolecule behavior is still a ways off. The problems that MD simulations can solve well are very specific: the behavior of proteins in water, he tells C&EN.

Bill Gropp, IACAT deputy director for research, and Marc Snir, the Faiman-Muroga Professor of Computer Science, are participating with Sandia National Labs in a new effort as part of the the DARPA Ubiquitous High Performance Computing challenge to create a new exascale computing architecture. They will help Sandia researchers prototype a new extreme-scale hardware and software system called X-caliber.

Klaus Schulten describes how researchers at Illinois tapped into the potential of GPUs to accelerate and improve their biophysical simulations.