Tacc Podcasts

The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) celebrated the official launch of its newest supercomputing system, Frontera, funded by a $60 million award from the National Science Foundation. Frontera aims to help scientists with the cyberinfrastructure resources to tackle some of the biggest unknowns in science. And it’s made a promising start, with an initial rank of #5 fastest supercomputer in the world and #1 fastest academic system, according to the June 2019 Top500 rankings. Fleming Crim, the Chief Operating Officer of the National Science Foundation, gave opening remarks at the dedication event for the launch of Frontera. TACC Podcast host Jorge Salazar interviewed Crim about the NSF-funded Frontera system and the value of supercomputers for fundamental research.

The University of Texas at Austin has claimed a leadership role in supercomputing with the top academic system in the world, Frontera, located at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC). The National Science Foundation awarded TACC $60 million for building and operating Frontera, the fifth fastest computer in the world according to the June 2019 Top500 rankings. Frontera’s dedication event on September 3, 2019 was marked by an address from UT Austin President Greg Fenves. TACC podcast host Jorge Salazar interviewed President Fenves shortly afterwards, where he spoke on the impact the NSF-funded Frontera supercomputer will have on the university and the world at large.

Trust, but verify. The well-known proverb speaks to the heart of the scientific method, which builds on the results of others but requires that data be collected in a way that can be repeated with the same results. Beyond just recreating the conditions of a physical experiment, the computational analysis of data also factors into scientific reproducibility. Joining host Jorge Salazar on the podcast are Dan Stanzione, Executive Director of the Texas Advanced Computing Center and Associate Vice-President for Research at the University of Texas at Austin; and Doug James, former Deputy Director for High Performance Computing at the Texas Advanced Computing Center. Most of the computational resources mentioned on the podcast such as the Stampede2 supercomputer are funded by the National Science Foundation.

Using supercomputers, scientists are just starting to design proteins that self-assemble to combine and resemble life-giving molecules like hemoglobin. Hemoglobin molecules in red blood cells transport oxygen by changing their shape. Four copies of the same protein in hemoglobin open and close like flower petals, structurally coupled to respond to each other. A science team from the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Michigan made a flower-like structured molecule by supercharging proteins, which means they changed the subunits of proteins called amino acids to give them an overall artificially high positive or negative charge. The scientists first reported their findings in January of 2019 in the Journal Nature Chemistry. The scientists say their methods could be applied to useful technologies such as pharmaceutical targeting, artificial energy harvesting, 'smart' sensing and building materials, and more. Host Jorge Salazar interviews Jens Glaser and Vyas Ramasubramani of the University of

This podcast is part of our inaugural yearly magazine called Texascale, available at www.tacc.utexas.edu/texascale. Host Jorge Salazar interviews Charlie Dey, Director of Training and Professional Development at TACC. Dey outlined the the TACC Institutes, which work to educate the next generation of supercomputing professionals. Full Q&A at this link:www.tacc.utexas.edu/texascale/2018/…e-workforce-gap Music Credit: Raro Bueno, Chuzausen freemusicarchive.org/music/Chuzausen/

Change is in the air, and water, of the Arctic Ocean. Scientists are keeping an eye out on shrinking sea ice, five million square miles of floating ice surrounding the North Pole. It bounces sunlight back to space, which keeps polar regions cool and helps moderate global climate. An award-winning simulation shows the complex changes in circulation happening at one of Earth’s most remote and inaccessible places, the Arctic Ocean. The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) shared an award with UT Austin’s Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences (ICES) for the Best Scientific Visualization & Data Analytics Showcase, "Circulation in the Arctic Ocean and its Marginal Seas: From Low Latitudes to the Pole and Back." The supercomputing conference SC18 gave the award in November of 2018 to the team of lead author Greg Foss and Briana Bradshaw of TACC; and An Nguyen, Arash Bigdeli, Victor Ocaña and Patrick Heimbach of ICES. Podcast host Jorge Salazar interviews Greg Foss of TACC about the Arctic Ocea

It’s easy to take a lot for granted. Scientists do this when they study stress, the force per unit area on an object. Scientists handle stress mathematically by assuming it to have symmetry. That means the components of stress are identical if you transform the stressed object with something like a turn or a flip. Supercomputer simulations show that at the atomic level, material stress doesn’t behave symmetrically. That’s according to a study published September of 2018 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A. The findings could help scientists come up with new materials such as glass or metal that doesn’t ice up. On the podcast to talk more about the stress study is Liming Xiong, Assistant Professor, Department of Aerospace Engineering, Iowa State University. Dr. Xiong used supercomputer allocations on XSEDE, the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment, funded by the National Science Foundation. That gave Xiong access to the Comet system at the San Diego Supercomputer Center; and Jetstream, a

Any truck operator knows that hydraulics do the heavy lifting. Water does the work because it’s nearly incompressible at normal scales. But things behave strangely in nanotechnology, the control of materials at the scale of atoms and molecules. Using supercomputers, scientists found a surprising amount of water compression at the nanoscale. These findings could help advance medical diagnostics through creation of nanoscale systems that detect, identify, and sort biomolecules. The unexpected effect comes from the action of an electric field on water in very narrow pores and in very thin materials. That’s according to research by Aleksei Aksimentiev and James Wilson of the Department of Physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. They published their findings in Physical Review Letters, June of 2018. Aksimentiev and Wilson used supercomputer time awarded through XSEDE, the Extreme Science and Engineering Discover Environment, funded by the National Science. Foundation. XSEDE allocations allowed t

The National Science Foundation announced on August 29, 2018 an award of 60 million dollars to the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at UT Austin for the acquisition and deployment of a new supercomputer that will be the fastest at any U.S. university and among the most powerful in the world. The new system is called Frontera , Spanish for "frontier," and it will begin operations in 2019. On this TACC podcast, host Jorge Salazar interviewed Manish Parashar, Office Director for the the Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure at the National Science Foundation. Dr. Parashar took time out during the announcement event at TACC to talk more about the Frontera supercomputer. Story Link: www.tacc.utexas.edu/-/a-new-fronter…nce-discoveries Music Credit: Raro Bueno, Chuzausen freemusicarchive.org/music/Chuzausen/

Scientists have used supercomputers to engineer an enzyme that breaks down plastic. It’s called polyethylene terephthalate, or PET, and it’s used to make things like carpets and bottles for soda and water. This plastic pollutes the soil and the oceans. The scientists say it’s a first step toward recycling PET and other plastics into commercially valuable materials at industrial scale. They published their results March of 2018 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The researchers took advantage for this study of computational resources of XSEDE, the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment, funded by the National Science Foundation. They used the Stampede2 supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center, and they used the Comet supercomputer at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. These systems helped them simulate the interactions of the plastic-degrading enzyme with PET. On the podcast to talk about their study are co-authors Gregg Beckham and Lee Woodcock. Gregg Beckham

What makes kevlar stop a bullet, at the atomic level? The properties of materials emerge from their molecular or atomic structure. Yet many details between the micro and the macro remain a mystery to science. Scientists are actively researching the rational design of targeted supramolecular architectures, with the goal of engineering their structural dynamics and their response to environmental cues. A team of chemists at the University of California, San Diego has now designed a two-dimensional protein crystal that toggles between states of varying porosity and density. This is a first in biomolecular design that combined experimental studies with computation done on supercomputers through an allocation on XSEDE, the Extreme Science And Engineering Discovery Environment, funded by the National Science Foundation. XSEDE awarded the UCSD researchers over a million core hours on the Maverick supercomputer, a dedicated visualization and data analysis resource that uses graphics processing units at the Texas Ad

Scientists have made the best computational modeling yet of mantle plumes. These are hypothesized, mushroom-shaped upwellings of hot rock from deep in the Earth that reach more than a thousand kilometers down. The scientists modeled mantle plumes on the Stampede supercomputer of the Texas Advanced Computing Center through an allocation on XSEDE, the eXtreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment funded by the National Science Foundation. And through XSEDE they also took advantage of Science Gateways and of the Campus Champions program at the University of Michigan. With that support they showed, for the first time, details of how mantle plumes form and how they rise from Earth's mantle. What's more, the researchers say their work could guide future experiments with seismic imaging and help get to the bottom of mysteries like the origin of Hawaii's volcanos. The international science team published their results on mantle plumes in January of 2018 in the American Geophysical Union's Journal of Geophysic

Scientists have used big data to catch a big fish genome. Researchers assembled and annotated for the first time the genome of Seriola dorsalis, also known as California Yellowtail, a fish of high value to the sashimi, or raw seafood industry. The science team members were from the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service, Iowa State University, and the Instituto Politécnico Nacional in Mexico. They published their results January of 2018 in the journal BMC Genomics. Assembling and annotating a genome is like building a three dimensional jigsaw puzzle, and the Seriola dorsalis genome had 685 million pieces - its base pairs of DNA - to put together. The researchers were awarded computational allocations from XSEDE, the eXtreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment funded by the National Science Foundation. That gave them access to the Blacklight system at the Pittsburg Supercomputing Center to assemble the Seriola dorsalis genome. XSEDE also allocated use of the Stampede1 supercomputer at the Texas Advan

Imagine a new kind of computer that can quickly solve problems that would stump even the world’s most powerful supercomputers. Quantum computers are fundamentally different. They can store information as not only just ones and zeros, but in all the shades of gray in-between. Several companies and government agencies are investing billions of dollars in the field of quantum information. But what will quantum computers be used for? South by Southwest 2018 hosts a panel on March 10th called Quantum Computing: Science Fiction to Science Fact. Experts on quantum computing make up the panel, including Jerry Chow of IBM; Bo Ewald of D-Wave Systems; Andrew Fursman of 1QBit; and Antia Lamas-Linares of the Texas Advanced Computing Center at UT Austin. Dr. Lamas-Linares is a Research Associate in the High Performance Computing group at TACC. Her background is as an experimentalist with quantum computing systems, including work done with them at the Centre for Quantum Technologies in Singapore. She joins podcast host Jor

Artificial intelligence - or AI - is helping people make better decisions about how to manage water resources. That’s because scientists are taking the best tools of advanced computing to help make science-based decisions about complex and pressing problems in how to manage Earth’s resources, including water. A science panel on AI and water management meets in Austin, Texas on February 17th at the 2018 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Suzanne Pierce moderates and co-organized the panel. Pierce is a Research Scientist in Dynamic Decision Support Systems and part of the Data Management & Collections Group of the Texas Advanced Computing Center. Podcast host Jorge Salazar interviews Suzanne Pierce of TACC about the Intelligent Systems for Geosciences community, of which she is on the steering committee; her panel on AI and water management at the AAAS, and the work TACC is doing to support efforts to bridge advanced computing with Earth science.

Some scientists think there might be light at the end of the tunnel in the hunt for better semiconductor materials for solar cells and LEDs. That’s according to an August 2017 study that used supercomputer simulations with graphics processing units to model nanocrystals of silicon. Solar cells have a problem with heat. Photovoltaics on solar panels lose some energy as heat in when they convert sunlight to electricity. The reverse holds true for LED lights, which convert electricity into light. Scientists call the heat loss in LEDs and solar cells non-radiative recombination. And they’ve struggled to understand the basic physics of this heat loss, especially for materials with molecules of over 20 atoms. Podcast host Jorge Salazar interviews Benjamin Levine, an associate professor in the Department of Chemistry at Michigan State University. Dr. Levine models the behavior caused by defects in materials, such as doping bulk silicon to transform it into semiconductors in transistors, LEDs, and solar cells. Levine

Some secrets of our skeletons might be found in the silky webs of golden orb weaver spiders, according to experiments guided by supercomputers. Scientists don’t yet understand the details of osteogenesis, or how bones form. A study found that silica combined with engineered silk derived from the dragline of golden orb weaver spider webs could be fine-tuned to activate genes in human stem cells that initiated biomineralization, a key step in bone formation. The study appeared September 2017 in the journal Advanced Functional Materials. The authors used supercomputers through and allocation from XSEDE, the Xtreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment, funded by the National Science Foundation. Stampede at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) and Comet at the San Diego Supercomputing Center helped scientists model the protein folding of integrin, an essential step in the intracellular pathways that lead to osteogenesis. This research will help larger efforts to cure bone disorders such as osteoporo

Black holes make for a great space mystery. They're so massive that nothing, not even light, can escape a black hole once it gets close enough. A great mystery for scientists is the evidence of powerful jets of electrons and protons that shoot out of the top and bottom of some black holes. Yet no one knows how these jets form. Computer code called Cosmos now fuels supercomputer simulations of black hole jets and is starting to reveal the mysteries of black holes and other space oddities. Cosmos code developer Chris Fragile joins host Jorge Salazar on the TACC podcast. Fragile is a professor in the Physics and Astronomy Department of the College of Charleston. Also featured on the podcast is Damon McDougall, a Research Associate in the HPC Applications at the Texas Advanced Computing Center, also appointed jointly at the Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences of the University of Texas at Austin. McDougall spoke more about XSEDE Extended Collaborative Support Services.

How do you make a building that can stand up to an earthquake? A summer camp at TACC smoothed the way for high school students to learn about the science behind building design for earthquakes. It's called Code @ TACC DesignSafe. The summer camp was funded by DesignSafe, a national program supported by the National Science Foundation. DesignSafe is a web-based research platform of the Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure Network that helps engineers build safer structures that can better withstand natural hazards such as earthquakes and windstorms. The Code @ TACC DesignSafe Camp students were given a project under budget to design their own custom building models outfitted with sensors that recorded their movement as they were shaken under laboratory conditions based on historical earthquake data. TACC Podcast host Jorge Salazar interviews Joon-Yee Chuah, Outreach Coordinator at the Texas Advanced Computing Center; Chunxiao Ge, a physics and biology teacher at the Colorado River Collegiate Aca

On July 28, 2017 The Texas Advanced Computing Center of the University of Texas at Austin dedicated a new supercomputer called Stampede2. Funded by a 30 million dollar award to TACC from the National Science Foundation, Stampede2 is the most powerful supercomputer at any academic institution in the U.S. Stampede2 will be used during its four-year lifecycle for scientific research and serve as a strategic national resource to provide high-performance computing capabilities to the open science community. TACC Podcast host Jorge Salazar interviewed Greg Fenves, President of UT Austin, to discuss Stampede2 and the importance of supercomputers to the university. Greg Fenves: Stampede2 is a fabulous technology. But technology ultimately comes from people's ideas. And what we've been able to do at the University of Texas and with the Texas Advanced Computing Center is bring some of the smartest people to work with our partners, Dell and Intel, to create fabulous new technology that can then be deployed and is now be