The Green500 List debuted in November 2007 and ushered in a new era of energy-efficient supercomputing. The Green500 List is intended to serve as a ranking of the most energy-efficient supercomputers in the world and as a complementary view to the Top500 List.

A job queuing system for the VT-ARC SGI servers, similar to the one used for System X, is now available in production mode on both Cauldron and Inferno2.

An interdisciplinary team led by researchers at Virginia Tech has provided a computational solution to a decades-old puzzle left outstanding by a Nobel Prize-winning team.

Using System X, computer science professor Naren Ramakrishnan and fellow researcher Upinder S. Bhalla have found that cells can make use of switches to support important biological functions and have cataloged more templates of switches withing a living cell than we use throughout our day.

Pavan Balaji of Argonne National Laboratory and Wu Feng of the Department of Computer Science in Virginia Tech's College of Engineering led an international team of researchers that received the International Supercomputing Conference 2008 Distinguished Paper Award.

CAREER project Engineering professor Mark Paul says he plans to use System X supercomputer to build a better understanding of complex systems and develop hands-on numerical experiments that will enable pre-college students to explore chaotic dynamics for themselves.

Scott D. King, professor of geosciences in Virginia Tech's College of Science, has created numerical simulations of the three-dimensional nature of convection within Mercury's silicate mantle. The computations were done using the Virginia Tech geoscience department's High-Performance Earth Simulation System (HESS), a high-speed, high-capacity 768-core Dell computing cluster maintained by VT-ARC.

Ali R. Butt, an assistant professor of computer science in Virginia Tech's College of Engineering, has received a $400,000 Faculty Early Career Development Award, which is the National Science Foundation's most prestigious award for creative junior faculty who are considered to be future leaders in their academic fields.

Computational science specialist John Burkardt was awarded a research grant from Sandia National Laboratories for "Investigation and implementation of sparse grids" for the 2008 calendar year. For the grant, John will be collaborating with Clayton Webster, who received this year's prestigious John von Neumann fellowship at Sandia. The grant will enable them to extend John's sparse grid programs so that they can tackle the stochastic problems that Clayton has been analyzing for some time.