SCIENCE

The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) has had a very exciting year. In 2010, between supporting emergency relief efforts in Haiti and the Gulf of Mexico, and deploying Longhorn -- the most powerful, interactive, hardware-accelerated visualization system in the world -- TACC enabled thousands of research projects, continued to expand the strategic vision for the center, and partnered with the National Science Foundation (NSF), The University of Texas at Austin, Texas A&M, Texas Tech and UT research groups, to acquire its newest HPC system: Lonestar 4.

This year at SC10, TACC's booth activities will highlight socially significant scientific research made possible by its advanced computing resources, while also demonstrating staff R&D projects, and highlighting its future directions.

Several leading researchers will speak in the booth, including, Omar Ghattas, 2010 ACM Gordon Bell Prize nominee; Corey Trahan, representing the multi-institutional research team led the effort to model the movement of the Gulf oil spill; and Sebastien Steiger, a member of the Nanoelectronic Modeling Group at Purdue University and a developer for nanoHUB. 

Also speaking in the booth will be TACC Director Jay Boisseau; Deputy Director Dan Stanzione; and Associate Director Kelly Gaither. Their talks will cover the center's initiatives in the coming year, new developments in the iPlant Collaborative cyberinfrastructure project, and lessons learned from a year operating the GPU-accelerated Longhorn visualization cluster, respectively.

Between these talks, TACC staff will demonstrate leading-edge technologies developed by researchers at the center, such as the EnVision remote visualization software package, methods for ray tracing, stereoscopic molecular visualization, portals for plant biologists, and data-centric cyberinfrastructure.

The booth will also feature stunning visualizations and digital art on Colt (a 3x3 tiled display powered by a Dell graphics cluster that enables very large data sets at high resolution), and 3D animations and demonstrations on Mustang, TACC's 82" stereoscopic display.

Additionally, TACC staff will participate in and lead a number of tutorials, talks, and panels at the conference, including three in the workforce development area, a special topic for SC10. In these discussions, TACC staff will describe the development of a computational curriculum in collaboration with Chevron, digital art exhibitions driven by HPC systems, and the recruitment and training of systems engineers.

On the education front, TACC will sponsor a team of students from The University of Texas at Austin in the SC10 Student Cluster Challenge for the first time, in association with Dell. We will also be distributing a preview of the Scientific Computing Curriculum to interested educators.

As always, TACC staff will be on hand to discuss high performance computing, remote visualization, data storage and archiving, and to provide one-on-one guidance on advanced computing techniques and technologies.