News

The National Institute for Computational Sciences’ (NICS’s) Cray XT5 supercomputer—Kraken—has been upgraded to become the first academic system to surpass a thousand trillion calculations a second, or one petaflop, a landmark achievement that will greatly accelerate science and place Kraken among the top five computers in the world.

The number of transistors that will fit onto a modern computer chip may soon reach the limit, and the usual materials have been pushed to their performance peak. If Moore’s Law is to continue to hold true, a technological revolution of some sort is necessary. Supercomputers are preparing engineers for battle.

Proteins are made up of different segments, or domains, that may help determine their function and give clues to their evolution. Given that there are thousands of proteins that relate to human diseases, deciphering the various proteins in terms of their domains has enormous medical implications. This domain modeling is precisely what Rekepalli and his colleagues Christian Halloy at NICS and Igor Jouline, leader of the computational biology and bioinformatics group at JICS, have been working to improve.

This story was recently featured in US News and World Report.

Very few things in life are certain. If you live in Southern California, however, rest assured that some time in the next few decades you will experience an earthquake of significant magnitude.

And while the disaster itself is probably unavoidable, knowing which areas will be most affected can do a great deal to mitigate the aftermath. For example, where will the strongest ground movement occur, and how long will the shaking last? Obviously, when it comes to new construction in an area with a high probability of an earthquake in the relatively near future, this knowledge is invaluable. Engineers crave this sort of data when they are designing the buildings of tomorrow.

The world’s fastest academic supercomputer is now up and running. Kraken, a Cray XT5 system located at the National Institute for Computational Sciences (NICS), managed by the University of Tennessee (UT) and funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), promises to push the limits of simulation science.

Chains of amino acids called peptides move, jump, twist, and change shape, all of which add to the myriad difficulties involved in peptide research. Yet understanding them is instrumental in putting them to good use—for example, in the treatment of diabetes. To better understand one such peptide’s properties and strengthen its effectiveness in combating this disease, a team led by Adrian Roitberg of the University of Florida has used approximately 500,000 hours on Kraken at NICS.

One area in which Kraken’s presence will surely be felt is climate change. With the consensus that carbon dioxide is altering the Earth’s climate, the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has asked climate modelers to perform a new type of short-term climate simulation.