Tacc Podcasts

Astrophysicists have been puzzled by their observations since the 1970s that only a small fraction of matter in the cloud becomes a star and part of a galaxy. They found a lot less of the universe's mass than expected in the middle of galaxies. Things changed when a multi-university collaboration produced a set of new supercomputer models of galaxies called FIRE, The Feedback in Realistic Environments. FIRE simulations ran on the Stampede supercomputer at TACC, an XSEDE resource funded by the National Science Foundation. Theoretical astrophysicist Philip Hopkins of CalTech led a 2014 study of initial results that found that star activity - like supernova explosions or even just starlight - plays a big part in the formation of other stars and the growth of galaxies. Philip Hopkins spoke more about galaxies on FIRE.

Sathoshi Matsuoka came to the supercomputing conference SC14 and received the 2014 IEEE Computer Society Sidney Fernbach Award for innovation in the application of high performance computers. Dr. Matsuoka is a professor and leader of the Tsubame project, one of the world's fastest and most efficient supercomputing grid clusters. Tsubame is at the Global Scientific Information and Computing Center, hosted by the Tokyo Institute of Technology. We spoke with Sathoshi Matsuoka on the opening night of a busy convention floor at SC14.

Thomas Sterling spoke on a couple of panels at the supercomputing conference SC14 that looked at the promises and pitfalls on the path to developing exascale supercomputers, the next-generation of the world's fastest computers. Dr. Sterling is the executive associate director and chief scientist at the Center for Research in Extreme Scale Technologies at Indiana University, Bloomington. He's won the Gordon Bell Prize for innovations in high performance computing, and he laid the foundation for the current paradigm of supercomputers by co-developing the Beowulf cluster of commodity Linux cluster computing. Sterling's latest project is the ParalleX execution model being tested in part on XSEDE resources here at TACC with the Stampede supercomputer.

Best-selling author and physicist Brian Greene of Columbia University gave the keynote address at the SC14 conference. His latest book is The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos. In it Greene describes the hypothesis of multiple universes, and in particular that of a computer simulated multiverse. Brian Greene spoke with me by phone about the possibilities and future of supercomputing.

Computer scientists from the University of Texas at Austin's Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences, or ICES, teamed up with researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to present work at the technical program of the supercomputing conference SC14. It's titled "Parallelization of Reordering Algorithms for Bandwidth and Wavefront Reduction." Here to explain the work and to talk a little about SC14 is Keshav Pingali, a professor in the computer science department at UT Austin and a member of ICES.

Larry Smarr was an invited speaker at SC14, where he shared his experience studying the ecology of microbes inside his body using the XSEDE cluster Gordon of the San Diego Supercomputer Center. Dr. Smarr is the director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, and he holds the Harry E. Gruber professorship in Computer Science and Engineering at the Jacobs School of Engineering of the University of California in San Diego. Larry Smarr's spent his early career as an astrophysicist computing the dynamics of black holes. In the mid-1980s he led the proposal to the National Science Foundation that created the first national supercomputing center specifically for university researchers, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His work there led to the creation of Mosaic, the world's first widely used graphical Web browser.

Two graduate students from UT Austin, Dhairya Malhotra and Amir Gholami, are up for Best Student Paper at the supercomputing conference SC14. They've co-authored the work with George Biros, a professor in mechanical engineering and computer science at UT Austin's Institute for Computational Engineering and Science. Dr. Biros is a two-time winner of the Gordon Bell Prize for innovation in high performance computing. In this podcast he spoke more about the paper he and his students are presenting for SC14.

Larry Smarr is the founding Director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), a UC San Diego/UC Irvine partnership, and holds the Harry E. Gruber professorship in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) of UCSD’s Jacobs School of Engineering. At Calit2, he has continued to drive major developments in information infrastructure-- including the Internet, Web, scientific visualization, virtual reality, and global telepresence--begun during his previous 15 years as founding Director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA).

A group of scientists peered thousands of years back into Europe's murky past and found a mysterious ancestor. Researchers used the Stampede supercomputer, supported by the National Science Foundation, to analyze and compare genomes from modern Europeans to ancient genomes from bones seven, eight, and twenty-four thousand years old.

This clip is from an interview released November 14, 2014 as part of coverage of the SC14 conference.

It turns out that bacteria inside your mouth drastically change how they act when you're diseased, for instance with the gum disease periodontitis. That's according to research led by Marvin Whiteley and Keith Turner of the University of Texas at Austin. Together they used the Stampede and Lonestar supercomputers of TACC to compare gene expression of 160,000 genes in healthy and diseased periodontal communities of bacteria.

This podcast interview features Alex Gorfe, an Assistant professor of integrative biology and pharmacology at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston Medical School. Dr. Gorfe used simulations with TACC's Lonestar and Stampede supercomputers to reveal new changes happening in the cell membrane as it interacts with an enzyme linked to cancer.