Press Room

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.

A team of researchers led by Pavan Balaji of Argonne National Laboratory and Wu Feng of Virginia Tech won an international competition for the most effective approach in using large-scale storage for high-performance computing. The award was presented Nov. 15 at SC|07, the world's premier conference on high-performance computing and networking.

Over the past year, the issue of power efficiency has become particularly important in light of recent reports that spending on power and cooling is fast approaching, if not exceeding, new server spending in datacenter environments.

A new computing cluster, the High-Performance Earth Simulation System (HESS), will allow Virginia Tech's geoscientists to see the earth's mantle in greater detail than ever before and answer such questions as, "Just how big is the plume from the earth's core that fuels Hawaiian volcanoes?"

Visualization specialist Nicholas Polys and computational science specialist John Burkardt, both of Blacksburg, have joined the support staff for Advanced Research Computing at Virginia Tech.

Vivek Venugopal won the first prize for a poster in the Engineering category at the recently held 23rd GSA Research Symposium 2007.  The poster Reconfigurable FPGA-based Clusters: Next Step in Supercomputing addresses the requirement of a reconfigurable framework for High Performance Computing systems for better performance.

Tech researchers in computer science and biology have used the university's supercomputer, System X, to create models and algorithms that make it possible to simulate the cell cycle -- the processes leading to cell division. They have demonstrated that the new mathematical models and numerical algorithms provide powerful tools for studying the complex processes going on inside living cells.

Elisa Sotelino uses Virginia Tech's System X to learn how entire structures will behave under different circumstances, such as a compartment fire or an earthquake.  "My models are very large and I need the advantages of the parallel computing capabilities of System X to run these models."

Virginia Tech researchers used novel methodology and the university's System X supercomputer to carry out what is probably the first simulation that explores full range of motions of a DNA strand of 147 base pairs, the length that is required to form the fundamental unit of DNA packing in the living cells -- the nucleosome. Contrary to a long-held belief that DNA is hard to bend, the simulation shows in crisp atomic detail that DNA is considerably more flexible than commonly thought.

Total allocated time on System X, Virginia Tech's 1100 node Apple/Infiniband cluster, has crossed the 15,000,000 CPU-hour mark.

Two VisBox-X3 modules were recently installed at the Computer Science Department at Virginia Tech. The 3DI (Three-Dimensional Interaction) Group will use the displays for their research in interaction techniques for immersive virtual environments.

When you ask a supercomputer to tell a story, you might not expect a creative outcome or any. But a group of Virginia Tech researchers are using System X, the university's supercomputer, to test a new search program that can tell the stories of life -- the connections between gene sets, for instance, or the connections between discoveries reported in biomedical articles on the U.S. National Library of Medicine PubMed database.

Soon after Virginia Tech's System X supercomputer was created, it attracted worldwide attention as the world's third-fastest computer, the fastest at an academic institution, the leading price-performer among supercomputing systems, and the first constructed with Apple computers.

Research time on System X, the 2200 processor supercomputer at the Virginia Tech Terascale Computing Facility (TCF), is now available on a cost-recovery basis to computational science and engineering researchers. System X is currently rated the world's fastest academic supercomputer.