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IMAGE: The Frontera expansion added nearly 400 Dell EMC PowerEdge R640 server nodes, housed in 11 racks. view more
Credit: TACC
Frontera the 9th fastest supercomputer in the world, deployed at The University of Texas at Austin s Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) has expanded thanks to a supplemental award from the National Science Foundation (NSF), which funded the system, and a substantial contribution from Dell Technologies and Intel.
The expansion will contribute to TACC s urgent computing capabilities, accelerating life sciences research during the COVID-19 pandemic and supporting rapid responses to emergencies like hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes, floods, and other large-scale disasters.
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Texas A&M University researchers have designed a reinforcement-based algorithm that automates the process of predicting the properties of the underground environment, facilitating the accurate forecasting of oil and gas reserves.
Within the Earth s crust, layers of rock hold bountiful reservoirs of groundwater, oil and natural gas. Now, using machine learning, researchers at Texas A&M University have developed an algorithm that automates the process of determining key features of the Earth s subterranean environment. They said this research might help with accurate forecasting of our natural reserves.
Specifically, the researchers algorithm is designed on the principle of reinforcement or reward learning. Here, the computer algorithm converges on the correct description of the underground environment based on rewards it accrues for making correct predictions of the pressure and flow expected from boreholes.
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IMAGE: Monkey being examined in Manaus area. Scientists will monitor areas in which these diseases are endemic to investigate the factors that trigger outbreaks view more
Credit: CREATE-NEO
By Maria Fernanda Ziegler | Agência FAPESP – Yellow fever was the first human disease to have a licensed vaccine and has long been considered important to an understanding of how epidemics happen and should be combated. It was introduced to the Americas in the seventeenth century, and high death rates have resulted from successive outbreaks since then. Epidemics of yellow fever were associated with the slave trade, the US gold rush and settlement of the Old West, the Haitian Revolution, and construction of the Panama Canal, to cite only a few examples.
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Graphs data structures that show the relationship among objects are highly versatile. It s easy to imagine a graph depicting a social media network s web of connections. But graphs are also used in programs as diverse as content recommendation (what to watch next on Netflix?) and navigation (what s the quickest route to the beach?). As Ajay Brahmakshatriya summarizes: graphs are basically everywhere.
Brahmakshatriya has developed software to more efficiently run graph applications on a wider range of computer hardware. The software extends GraphIt, a state-of-the-art graph programming language, to run on graphics processing units (GPUs), hardware that processes many data streams in parallel. The advance could accelerate graph analysis, especially for applications that benefit from a GPU s parallelism, such as recommendation algorithms.
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IMAGE: The spatial intensity profile of a laser beam propagating in a nonlinear medium spontaneously becomes nonuniform due to the process of modulational instability. view more
Credit: Institute for Basic Science
We are most familiar with the four conventional phases of matter: solid, liquid, gas, and plasma. Changes between two phases, known as phase transitions, are marked by abrupt changes in material properties such as density. In recent decades a wide body of physics research has been devoted to discovering new unconventional phases of matter, which typically emerge at ultra-low temperatures or in specially-structured materials. Exotic topological phases exhibit properties that can only change in a quantized (step-wise) manner, making them intrinsically robust against impurities and defects.