Oak Ridge Today

With help from two Oak Ridgers, UT students finish second in supercomputing competition

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National Institute for Computational SciencesWith help from two Oak Ridgers, a team of students from the University of Tennessee recently captured second place at the Student Cluster Competition in New Orleans.

Part of the SC14 Supercomputing Conference, the competition is a real-time, non-stop, 48-hour challenge in which teams of undergraduates, high school students, or both assemble a small computer cluster on the exhibit floor and then race to demonstrate the greatest sustained performance across a series of applications while staying under a 3,120-watt power limit.

One of the team members is Erik Blokland, an Oak Ridge graduate, and the other is Vincent Jodoin, who is a junior at Oak Ridge High School and helping the team. [Read more…]

Intel funding for UT will develop codes, open computing center at joint UT-ORNL institute

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Joint Institute for Computational Sciences

The Joint Institute for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory is pictured above. (Photo courtesy of ORNL)

KNOXVILLE—Imagine going to the doctor and the doctor peering into your genetic code to determine the best medicine to treat what ails you.

The University of Tennessee in Knoxville has received funding from computer chip maker Intel to develop computer codes to make personalized medicine like this and other transformative scientific discoveries possible.

The funding will open an Intel Parallel Computing Center at the Joint Institute for Computational Sciences, or JICS, at UT and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Parallel computing, used in supercomputers, is a form of computation in which many calculations are carried out simultaneously. The focus of the center will be to take supercomputing to the next level to meet scientific computing demands. Today’s research faces limitations due to the amount of data, time, and energy it takes to run calculations. [Read more…]

UT study predicts extreme climate in eastern United States

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From extreme drought to super storms, many wonder what the future holds for the climate of the eastern United States. A study conducted by researchers at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville does away with the guessing.

Results show the region will be hotter and wetter.

Joshua Fu, a civil and environmental engineering professor, and Yang Gao, a graduate research assistant, developed precise scales of cities that act as a climate crystal ball, seeing high-resolution climate changes almost 50 years into the future.

The study found that heat waves will become more severe in most regions of the eastern United States and that both the Northeast and Southeast will see a drastic increase in precipitation.

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New leader named to UT-ORNL Supercomputer Center

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Tony Mezzacappa

Tony Mezzacappa

Tony Mezzacappa, a leader in the field of astrophysics and supernova science, has been named director of the Joint Institute for Computational Sciences at the University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Mezzacappa is a world leader in computational astrophysics and a pioneer in the field of supernova science. He is a UT-Battelle Corporate Fellow and group leader for theoretical physics in the Physics Division at ORNL.

He is also a joint professor in the UT Department of Physics and Astronomy. With this new position, Mezzacappa will become the department’s Newton W. and Wilma C. Thomas Endowed Chair in Theoretical and Computational Astrophysics.

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