Supporting the Future of Mars Exploration with Supercomputers

You may have flown a flight simulator in a computer game or at a science museum. Landing without crashing is always the hardest part. But that’s nothing compared to the challenge that engineers are facing to develop a flight simulation of the very large vehicles necessary for humans to explore the surface of Mars. The Red Planet poses innumerable challenges to astronauts, not the least of which is getting there. That’s where the Department of Energy Office of Science’s user facility supercomputers come in. Researchers at DOE’s Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) are working with NASA engineers and scientists to simulate the process of slowing down a huge spacecraft as it moves towards Mars’ surface.

Calculation Shows Why Heavy Quarks Get Caught up in the Flow

Theorists have calculated how quickly a melted soup of quarks and gluons—the building blocks of protons and neutrons—transfers its momentum to heavy quarks. The calculation will help explain experimental results showing heavy quarks getting caught up in the flow of matter generated in heavy ion collisions.

Department of Energy Awards 18 Million Node-Hours of Computing Time to Support Cutting-Edge Research

Today, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced that 18 million node-hours have been awarded to 45 scientific projects under the Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) Leadership Computing Challenge (ALCC) program. The projects, with applications ranging from advanced energy systems to climate change to cancer research, will use DOE supercomputers to uncover unique insights about scientific problems that would otherwise be impossible to solve using experimental approaches.

Designing Materials from First Principles with Yuan Ping

The UC Santa Cruz professor uses computing resources at Brookhaven Lab’s Center for Functional Nanomaterials to run calculations for quantum information science, spintronics, and energy research.

LLNL welcomes “Ruby” supercomputer for national nuclear security mission & COVID-19 research

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), along with partners Intel, Supermicro and Cornelis Networks, have deployed “Ruby,” a high performance computing (HPC) cluster that will perform functions for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and support the Laboratory’s COVID-19 research.

Using supercomputers to combat Ebola

As the world grapples with COVID-19, the Ebola virus is again raging. A research team at University of Delaware is using supercomputers to simulate the inner workings of Ebola (as well as COVID-19), looking at how molecules move, atom by atom, to carry out their functions. Now, they have revealed structural features of the Ebola virus’s protein shell to provide therapeutic targets to destabilize the virus and knock it out with an antiviral treatment.

Galaxy Simulations Could Help Reveal Origins of Milky Way

Rutgers astronomers have produced the most advanced galaxy simulations of their kind, which could help reveal the origins of the Milky Way and dozens of small neighboring dwarf galaxies. Their research also could aid the decades-old search for dark matter, which fills an estimated 27 percent of the universe. And the computer simulations of “ultra-faint” dwarf galaxies could help shed light on how the first stars formed in the universe.