Tacc Podcasts

The Supersized Science podcast features research and discoveries nationwide enabled by advanced computing technology and expertise at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) of the University of Texas at Austin. Supersized Science is hosted by Jorge Salazar, a science writer at TACC. The 2024 Atlantic hurricane season left a trail of destruction in its wake, causing hundreds of fatalities and more than $200 billion dollars in damages. Despite the heavy toll, supercomputer simulations were an important tool for U.S. state and federal agencies in protecting life and property. Supercomputers at the Texas Advanced Computing Center—Vista, Frontera, Stampede3, and Lonestar6—are used for urgent computing to meet the needs of emergency responders with rapid and frequently updated simulations of storm surge, the often deadly rise in sea level and coastal flooding from big storms and hurricanes. On the podcast today to talk about TACC’s role in storm surge simulations is TACC staff scientist Carlos Del Castillo N

Something big is coming for science—the largest by far academic supercomputer in the U.S., called Horizon, as part of the U.S. National Science Foundation Leadership-Class Computing Facility (NSF LCCF), a project awarded to the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC). In July 2024, the NSF announced that TACC will begin construction of the NSF LCCF, which will be a distributed facility with six partners providing unique computational and data analytics capabilities, as well as critical software and services, for the nation’s science and engineering research community to enable discoveries that would not be possible otherwise. TACC will build and operate the Horizon supercomputer as part of the NSF LCCF. When it comes online in 2026, the supercomputer will be 10 times as powerful as the current leading academic supercomputer in the U.S.—Frontera—also operated by TACC. On the podcast to discuss the NSF LCCF and Horizon supercomputer is Dan Stanzione, executive director of TACC and principal investigator of th

The Supersized Science podcast features research and discoveries nationwide enabled by advanced computing technology and expertise at the Texas Advanced Computing Center of the University of Texas at Austin. Materials called metal-halide perovskites have quickly advanced in the last decade since their discovery as a semiconductor that outshines silicon in its conversion of light into electric current. Simulations on TACC's Frontera and Lonestar6 supercomputers have revealed surprising vortex structures in quasiparticles of electrons and atoms, called polarons, which contribute to generating electricity from sunlight. This new discovery can help scientists develop new solar cells and LED lighting. This type of lighting is hailed as eco-friendly, sustainable technology that can reshape the future of illumination. Podcast host Jorge Salazar, a science writer at TACC, is joined by Feliciano Giustino, professor of Physics and the W. A. ‘Tex’ Moncrief, Jr. Chair of Quantum Materials Engineering at the College o

The Supersized Science podcast features research and discoveries nationwide enabled by advanced computing technology and expertise at the Texas Advanced Computing Center of the University of Texas at Austin. Diamond is the hardest material found in nature — diamond also has the highest thermal conductivity, allowing the most heat to flow through it rapidly. An international team of scientists used TACC’s Frontera supercomputer for simulations that found that by flexing diamond, its thermal conductivity can be drastically tuned up or down. Scientists worldwide are interested in studying elastic strain engineering to discover the properties that materials exhibit when they are under large tensile or shear stresses. Findings like this could open the door for developing new microelectronic and optoelectronic devices such as computer chips, quantum sensors, communication devices, and more. Podcast host Jorge Salazar, a science writer at TACC, is joined on the podcast by Frank Shi, a former researcher in the De

The Supersized Science podcast features research and discoveries nationwide enabled by advanced computing technology and expertise at the Texas Advanced Computing Center of the University of Texas at Austin. Electric transformers convert high voltage to lower voltage that’s useful for households to plug into. In the U.S., transformers are aging and approaching an average of being 30 to 40 years old. And they face more stress than ever before brought on by factors such as renewable energy demands and by extreme weather events such as hurricanes, heat waves, and winter storms. University of Texas at Austin researchers have taken a look inside grid transformers to see if they could make them better. Inside grid transformers you’ll find copper windings, other metallic components, and cellulose-based electrical insulation like kraft paper. The cellulose insulation is a great electrical insulator essential in the process of ‘stepping down’ voltage, but it also traps heat, which can lead to overheating. Podcast h

The Supersized Science podcast features research and discoveries nationwide enabled by advanced computing technology and expertise at the Texas Advanced Computing Center of the University of Texas at Austin. TACC science writer Jorge Salazar hosts the podcast. Chemists have determined for the first time the crystal structure and unlocked the mechanism of activity of a family of enzymes that produce monensin, widely used as a cattle antibiotic. The University of Texas Research Cyberinfrastructure (UTRC) initiative awarded the monensin researchers supercomputer allocations on the Lonestar6 system at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) to meet the challenges of modeling the binding sites of monensin. UTRC provides advanced computing capabilities to researchers across all 14 UT System institutions. On the podcast is Lela Vukovic, an associate professor at The University of Texas, at El Paso. She performed the computational studies on the monensin research, published October 2023 in Nature Communications

The Supersized Science podcast features research and discoveries nationwide enabled by advanced computing technology and expertise at the Texas Advanced Computing Center of the University of Texas at Austin. TACC science writer Jorge Salazar hosts the podcast. Scientists have created the world’s first working nanoscale electromotor, according to research published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology. The science team designed a turbine engineered from DNA that is powered by hydrodynamic flow inside a nanopore, a nanometer-sized hole in a membrane of solid-state silicon nitride. The tiny motor could help spark research into future applications such as building molecular factories for useful chemicals or medical probes of molecules inside the bloodstream to detect diseases such as cancer. On the podcast today is study co-author Aleksei Aksimentiev, a professor of physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Aksimentiev used TACC’s Frontera supercomputer to perform all-atom molecular dynamics s

The Supersized Science podcast features research and discoveries nationwide enabled by advanced computing technology and expertise at the Texas Advanced Computing Center of the University of Texas at Austin. TACC science writer Jorge Salazar hosts the podcast. Optical tweezers manipulate tiny things like cells and nanoparticles using lasers. While they might sound like tractor beams from science fiction, the fact is their development garnered scientists a Nobel Prize in 2018. Scientists have now used TACC’s Stampede2 and Lonestar5 supercomputers to make optical tweezers safer to use on living cells with applications to cancer therapy, environmental monitoring, and more. On the podcast is Pavana Kollipara, a recent UT Austin graduate who co-authored a study on optical tweezers published August 2023 in Nature Communications, written just before he completed his PhD in mechanical engineering under fellow study co-author Yuebing Zheng of UT Austin, the corresponding author of the paper. Music Credit: Raro Bue

The Supersized Science podcast features research and discoveries nationwide enabled by advanced computing technology and expertise at the Texas Advanced Computing Center of the University of Texas at Austin. TACC science writer Jorge Salazar hosts a special podcast for the supercomputing conference SC23 in Denver, Colorado. The popularity of artificial intelligence has skyrocketed in 2023, thanks in large part to ChatGPT, which has created a Sputnik moment for AI, and has grabbed public attention, headlines, and funding. What’s less known is that decades of scientific supercomputing and high performance computing (HPC) laid the foundation for AI's moment. And now science codes have good reason to adapt and follow the technological trends AI leaves in its wake. On the podcast to discuss scientific HPC and AI is Dan Stanzione, executive director of TACC and project investigator of TACC’s largest supercomputers, Frontera, Stampede3, Lonestar6, and now Vista, TACC’s newest AI-focused system. Supersized Scienc

The Supersized Science podcast features research and discoveries nationwide enabled by advanced computing technology and expertise at the Texas Advanced Computing Center of the University of Texas at Austin. TACC science writer Jorge Salazar hosts the podcast. Optical tweezers manipulate tiny things like cells and nanoparticles using lasers. While they might sound like tractor beams from science fiction, the fact is their development garnered scientists a Nobel Prize in 2018. Scientists have now used TACC’s Stampede2 and Lonestar5 supercomputers to make optical tweezers safer to use on living cells with applications to cancer therapy, environmental monitoring, and more. On the podcast is Pavana Kollipara, a recent UT Austin graduate who co-authored a study on optical tweezers published August 2023 in Nature Communications, written just before he completed his PhD in mechanical engineering under fellow study co-author Yuebing Zheng of UT Austin, the corresponding author of the paper. Music Credit: Raro Bue

The Supersized Science podcast features research and discoveries nationwide enabled by advanced computing technology and expertise at the Texas Advanced Computing Center of the University of Texas at Austin. TACC science writer Jorge Salazar hosts the podcast. A planet about 950 light years from Earth could be the Looney Tunes’ Yosemite Sam equivalent of planets, blowing its atmospheric ‘top’ in spectacular fashion. The planet called HAT-P-32b is losing so much of its atmospheric helium that the trailing gas tails are among the largest structures yet known of an exoplanet, a planet outside our solar system, according to observations by astronomers. Three-dimensional simulations on the Stampede2 supercomputer of the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) helped model the flow of the planet’s atmosphere, based on data from the Hobby-Eberly Telescope of The University of Texas at Austin's McDonald Observatory. The scientists hope to widen their planet-observing net and survey 20 additional star systems to fin

The Supersized Science podcast features research and discoveries nationwide enabled by advanced computing technology and expertise at the Texas Advanced Computing Center of the University of Texas at Austin. The key to understanding proteins — such as those that govern cancer, COVID-19, and other diseases — is quite simple - for scientists, anyway. Identify their chemical structure and find which other proteins can bind to them. But there’s a catch in that the search space for proteins is enormous. For instance, a typical protein studied is made of 65 amino acids, and with 20 different amino acid choices at each binding position, there are 65 to the 20th power binding combinations, a number bigger than the estimated number of atoms there are in the universe. Joining host and TACC science writer Jorge Salazar on the podcast are Brian Coventry, a research scientist with the Institute for Protein Design, University of Washington and The Howard Hughes Medical Institute; and Nathaniel Bennett, a post-doctoral s

The Supersized Science podcast features research and discoveries nationwide enabled by advanced computing technology and expertise at the Texas Advanced Computing Center of the University of Texas at Austin. Science writer Jorge Salazar of TACC hosts the podcast. A dataset on seismic and tsunami hazards of a coastal Oregon town has received a 2023 DesignSafe Dataset award, given in recognition of the dataset's diverse contributions to natural hazards research. DesignSafe is a comprehensive cyberinfrastructure that is part of the NSF-funded Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI). It provides cloud-based tools to manage, analyze, understand, and publish critical data for research to understand the impacts of natural hazards. TACC works with DesignSafe to provide cyberinfrastructure and software development. On the podcast to talk about their award-winning research are Dan Cox, a professor in Civil Engineering; and Andre Barbosa, a professor in Structural Engineering, both at Oregon State

The Supersized Science podcast features research and discoveries nationwide enabled by advanced computing technology and expertise at the Texas Advanced Computing Center of the University of Texas at Austin. A dataset on "plausible worst-case scenario" flooding in California has received a 2023 DesignSafe Dataset award, given in recognition of the dataset's diverse contributions to natural hazards research. DesignSafe is a comprehensive cyberinfrastructure that is part of the NSF-funded Natural Hazard Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI) and provides cloud-based tools to manage, analyze, understand, and publish critical data for research to understand the impacts of natural hazards. TACC works with DesignSafe to provide cyberinfrastructure and software development. Joining host and TACC science writer Jorge Salazar on the podcast to talk about their award-winning research is Daniel Swain of the University of California, Los Angeles.

The Supersized Science podcast features research and discoveries nationwide enabled by advanced computing technology and expertise at the Texas Advanced Computing Center of the University of Texas at Austin. Jorge Salazar, a science writer at TACC, hosts the podcast. Scientists are using TACC’s Maverick2 supercomputer and data from the game Ebb and Flow by Lumosity to train deep learning models that mimic the human behavior of “task-switching,” shifting attention from one task to another. This basic research is important for helping scientists understand cognitive control, which encompasses the basic mental processes that allow one to focus on the task at hand, but also flexibly disengage from the task if the need arises. These abilities are taxed by the game Ebb and Flow that the researchers studied. The research may also inform the understanding of diseases in which patients exhibit deficits in cognitive control, such as bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. A study that developed new and more realistic m

The Supersized Science podcast features research and discoveries nationwide enabled by advanced computing technology and expertise at the Texas Advanced Computing Center of the University of Texas at Austin. Jorge Salazar, a science writer at TACC, hosts the podcast. A new leaf has turned in scientists' hunt for developing cutting-edge materials used in organic light-emitting diode (OLED) TV's, touchscreens, and more. The advance involves the polaron, a quasiparticle consisting of an electron and its surrounding distortions of atoms in a crystal lattice. Simulations on the Texas Advanced Computing Center's Frontera supercomputer have helped scientists map for the first time the conditions that characterize polarons in 2D materials, the thinnest materials that have ever been made. Understanding polarons can help improve the performance and efficiency of devices such as touchscreens for phones and tablets, and the organic light-emitting diodes of OLED TVs, which rely on electric charge transport through pola

The Supersized Science podcast features research and discoveries nationwide enabled by advanced computing technology and expertise at the Texas Advanced Computing Center of the University of Texas at Austin. Jorge Salazar, a science writer at TACC, hosts the podcast. Ultra-massive black holes are the most massive objects in the universe. Their mass can reach millions and billions of solar masses. Supercomputer simulations on TACC's Frontera supercomputer have helped astrophysicists reveal the origin of ultra-massive black holes formed about 11 billion years ago. On the podcast is Yueying Ni, a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Ni is the lead author of work published in The Astrophysical Journal (December 2022) that found ultra-massive black hole formation from the merger of triple quasars, systems of three galactic cores illuminated by gas and dust falling into a nested supermassive black hole. Supersized Science is part of the Texas Podcast Network – the conversation

The Supersized Science podcast features research and discoveries nationwide enabled by advanced computing technology and expertise at the Texas Advanced Computing Center of the University of Texas at Austin. Jorge Salazar, a science writer at TACC, hosts the podcast. If you hold one wire mesh on top of another one and look through it, you'll see a larger pattern called a moiré pattern formed by the overlapping grids of the two meshes, which depends on their relative twisted angle. Scientists developing new materials are actively studying moiré patterns in overlapping atomically thin materials — they produce intriguing electronic phenomena that includes unconventional superconductivity and ferromagnetism. Supercomputer simulations have helped scientists reveal in a bilayer moiré system a new species of an electronic phenomenon called an exciton, which is an electrically neutral quasiparticle, yet one that can carry energy and consists of an electron and electron ‘hole' that can be created for example by ligh

The Supersized Science podcast features research and discoveries nationwide enabled by advanced computing technology and expertise at the Texas Advanced Computing Center of the University of Texas at Austin. Jorge Salazar, a science writer at TACC, hosts the podcast. If you hold one wire mesh on top of another one and look through it, you'll see a larger pattern called a moiré pattern formed by the overlapping grids of the two meshes, which depends on their relative twisted angle. Scientists developing new materials are actively studying moiré patterns in overlapping atomically thin materials — they produce intriguing electronic phenomena that includes unconventional superconductivity and ferromagnetism. Supercomputer simulations have helped scientists reveal in a bilayer moiré system a new species of an electronic phenomenon called an exciton, which is an electrically neutral quasiparticle, yet one that can carry energy and consists of an electron and electron ‘hole' that can be created for example by ligh

The Supersized Science podcast features research and discoveries nationwide enabled by advanced computing technology and expertise at the Texas Advanced Computing Center of the University of Texas at Austin. Jorge Salazar, a science writer at TACC, hosts the podcast. A new mechanism has been determined for the first time for the passive transport of biomolecules through the nuclear pore complex, which are apertures that perforate the otherwise iron-clad membrane surrounding the cell nucleus and act like crossing guards for macromolecular traffic in and out of the nucleus. If the crossing-guard misfires, it can cause human diseases such as cancer, viral infections, and neurodegenerative conditions. The research team developed their model through supercomputer simulations on the Frontera and Stampede2 systems of TACC — and they hope their work will help guide the development of future therapeutics. The work was published in the journal Nature Communications in August 2022. On the podcast to talk more about i