Supersized Science

The Supersized Science podcast features research and discoveries nationwide enabled by advanced computing technology and expertise at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) of the University of Texas at Austin. Supersized Science is hosted by Jorge Salazar, a science writer at TACC. The 2024 Atlantic hurricane season left a trail of destruction in its wake, causing hundreds of fatalities and more than $200 billion dollars in damages. Despite the heavy toll, supercomputer simulations were an important tool for U.S. state and federal agencies in protecting life and property. Supercomputers at the Texas Advanced Computing Center—Vista, Frontera, Stampede3, and Lonestar6—are used for urgent computing to meet the needs of emergency responders with rapid and frequently updated simulations of storm surge, the often deadly rise in sea level and coastal flooding from big storms and hurricanes. On the podcast today to talk about TACC’s role in storm surge simulations is TACC staff scientist Carlos Del Castillo Negrete, a research associate in the High Performance Computing group. Supersized Science is part of the Texas Podcast Network – the conversations changing the world – brought to you by The University of Texas at Austin. The opinions expressed in this podcast represent the views of the hosts, and not of The University of Texas at Austin. Story Link: https://tacc.utexas.edu/news/latest-news/2025/01/23/hurricane-simulations-in-high-gear/ Music Credit: Raro Bueno, Chuzausen freemusicarchive.org/music/Chuzausen/

Something big is coming for science—the largest by far academic supercomputer in the U.S., called Horizon, as part of the U.S. National Science Foundation Leadership-Class Computing Facility (NSF LCCF), a project awarded to the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC). In July 2024, the NSF announced that TACC will begin construction of the NSF LCCF, which will be a distributed facility with six partners providing unique computational and data analytics capabilities, as well as critical software and services, for the nation’s science and engineering research community to enable discoveries that would not be possible otherwise. TACC will build and operate the Horizon supercomputer as part of the NSF LCCF. When it comes online in 2026, the supercomputer will be 10 times as powerful as the current leading academic supercomputer in the U.S.—Frontera—also operated by TACC. On the podcast to discuss the NSF LCCF and Horizon supercomputer is Dan Stanzione, executive director of TACC and principal investigator of the NSF LCCF. Highlights from the podcast include: • The NSF has elevated the LCCF, a computing facility with sustained, large-scale funding, to be on par with other large, strategic scientific initiatives such as the James Webb Space Telescope and the IceCube Neutrino Observatory. • The LCCF will have partners distributed throughout the country, including Atlanta University Center (AUC) Data Science Initiative at the AUC Consortium, a collaboration of four historically Black colleges and universities: Clark Atlanta University, Spelman College, Morehouse College and Morehouse School of Medicine; National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, a joint center of Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh; San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California San Diego; Cornell University; and Ohio State University. • The Horizon supercomputer will be a key universal instrument for a wide range of scientific domains, helping scientists investigate nature in time steps from the picoseconds of atoms to the gigayears cosmological galaxy clusters. • TACC is currently constructing Horizon with Sabey Data Centers in Round Rock, Texas, scheduled to come online in early 2026. • Horizon will support traditional 64-bit HPC computation as well as have a large supply of lower precision graphics processing units (GPU) tailored especially for artificial intelligence. • Horizon is expected to achieve 400 petaflops of HPC performance, about 10 times that of the NSF Frontera system, and the AI component will deliver 100x of Frontera performance. • The AI GPUs will offer tremendous power savings compared to the traditional HPC central processing unit (CPU) architecture. • The LCCF will offer workforce training opportunities with partners such as Moorehouse College, as well as other education and outreach services serving K-12, undergraduate, and graduate students through camps, internships, fellowships, and more. • Horizon will be used by academic researchers awarded allocations through a process similar to NSF Frontera awards. • Supercomputers bridging the gap at TACC between Frontera and Horizon include Stampede3 and Vista, which launched in 2024, as well as Lonestar6, launched in 2022.

The Supersized Science podcast features research and discoveries nationwide enabled by advanced computing technology and expertise at the Texas Advanced Computing Center of the University of Texas at Austin. Materials called metal-halide perovskites have quickly advanced in the last decade since their discovery as a semiconductor that outshines silicon in its conversion of light into electric current. Simulations on TACC's Frontera and Lonestar6 supercomputers have revealed surprising vortex structures in quasiparticles of electrons and atoms, called polarons, which contribute to generating electricity from sunlight. This new discovery can help scientists develop new solar cells and LED lighting. This type of lighting is hailed as eco-friendly, sustainable technology that can reshape the future of illumination. Podcast host Jorge Salazar, a science writer at TACC, is joined by Feliciano Giustino, professor of Physics and the W. A. ‘Tex’ Moncrief, Jr. Chair of Quantum Materials Engineering at the College of Natural Sciences and core faculty at the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences at UT Austin. Giustino co-authored research that discovered polarons in halide perovskites, which was published March 2024 in the Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences. Supersized Science is part of the Texas Podcast Network – the conversations changing the world – brought to you by The University of Texas at Austin. The opinions expressed in this podcast represent the views of the hosts, and not of The University of Texas at Austin. TACC link: https://tacc.utexas.edu/news/latest-news/2024/06/25/surprising-vortex-behind-new-solar-cell-and-lighting-materials/ Music Credits: Raro Bueno, Chuzausen freemusicarchive.org/music/Chuzausen/

The Supersized Science podcast features research and discoveries nationwide enabled by advanced computing technology and expertise at the Texas Advanced Computing Center of the University of Texas at Austin. Diamond is the hardest material found in nature — diamond also has the highest thermal conductivity, allowing the most heat to flow through it rapidly. An international team of scientists used TACC’s Frontera supercomputer for simulations that found that by flexing diamond, its thermal conductivity can be drastically tuned up or down. Scientists worldwide are interested in studying elastic strain engineering to discover the properties that materials exhibit when they are under large tensile or shear stresses. Findings like this could open the door for developing new microelectronic and optoelectronic devices such as computer chips, quantum sensors, communication devices, and more. Podcast host Jorge Salazar, a science writer at TACC, is joined on the podcast by Frank Shi, a former researcher in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering and the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dr. Shi is now a technical lead at Apple. Shi co-authored a study revealing diamond’s tunable thermal conductivity published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in February 2024. Supersized Science is part of the Texas Podcast Network – the conversations changing the world – brought to you by The University of Texas at Austin. The opinions expressed in this podcast represent the views of the hosts, and not of The University of Texas at Austin. TACC link: https://tacc.utexas.edu/news/latest-news/2024/05/29/diamond-heat/ Music Credits: Raro Bueno, Chuzausen freemusicarchive.org/music/Chuzausen/

The Supersized Science podcast features research and discoveries nationwide enabled by advanced computing technology and expertise at the Texas Advanced Computing Center of the University of Texas at Austin. Electric transformers convert high voltage to lower voltage that’s useful for households to plug into. In the U.S., transformers are aging and approaching an average of being 30 to 40 years old. And they face more stress than ever before brought on by factors such as renewable energy demands and by extreme weather events such as hurricanes, heat waves, and winter storms. University of Texas at Austin researchers have taken a look inside grid transformers to see if they could make them better. Inside grid transformers you’ll find copper windings, other metallic components, and cellulose-based electrical insulation like kraft paper. The cellulose insulation is a great electrical insulator essential in the process of ‘stepping down’ voltage, but it also traps heat, which can lead to overheating. Podcast host and TACC science writer Jorge Salazar is joined on the podcast by Vaibhav Bahadur, an associate professor in the Cockrell School of Engineering, UT Austin. Bahadur is the corresponding author of a study that modeled the impact of nanotechnology-based high thermal conductivity paper on the performance and life of grid transformers published March 2024 in Cell Press journal Heliyon. This is the first study that predicts the extent to which tuning the thermal conductivity of paper can enhance transformer life. Simulations TACC’s Stampede2 supercomputer helped Bahadur and his collaborators engineer solutions to overheating of grid transformers — a critical component of the electric grid. Supersized Science is part of the Texas Podcast Network – the conversations changing the world – brought to you by The University of Texas at Austin. The opinions expressed in this podcast represent the views of the hosts, and not of The University of Texas at Austin. TACC link: tacc.utexas.edu/news/latest-news/…he-electric-grid/ Music Credits: Raro Bueno, Chuzausen freemusicarchive.org/music/Chuzausen/

Scientists have found the crystal structure and unlocked the mechanism of activity of a family of enzymes that produce monensin, widely used as a cattle antibiotic.

Scientists have created the world's first working nanoscale electomotor. The science team designed a turbine engineered from DNA that is powered by hydrodynamic flow inside a nanopore, a nanometer-sized hole in a membrane of solid-state silicon nitride.

ACC's Frontera supercomputer helped astronomers develop PRIYA, the largest suite of hydrodynamic simulations yet made of large-scale structure in the universe.

SC23 podcast with Dan Stanzione, Executive Director of TACC / Associate Vice President for Research, UT Austin.

Optical tweezers use laser light to manipulate small particles. A new method has been advanced using Stampede2 supercomputer simulations that makes optical tweezers safer to use for potential biological applications, such as cancer therapy.

The planet HAT-P-32b is losing so much of its atmospheric helium that the trailing gas tails are among the largest structures yet known any planet outside our solar system.

The Supersized Science podcast features research and discoveries nationwide enabled by advanced computing technology and expertise at the Texas Advanced Computing Center of the University of Texas at Austin. The key to understanding proteins — such as those that govern cancer, COVID-19, and other diseases — is quite simple - for scientists, anyway. Identify their chemical structure and find which other proteins can bind to them. But there’s a catch in that the search space for proteins is enormous. For instance, a typical protein studied is made of 65 amino acids, and with 20 different amino acid choices at each binding position, there are 65 to the 20th power binding combinations, a number bigger than the estimated number of atoms there are in the universe. Joining host and TACC science writer Jorge Salazar on the podcast are Brian Coventry, a research scientist with the Institute for Protein Design, University of Washington and The Howard Hughes Medical Institute; and Nathaniel Bennett, a post-doctoral scholar at the Institute for Protein Design. Coventry and Bennett co-authored a study published May 2023 in the journal Nature Communications. In it their team used deep learning methods on TACC’s Frontera supercomputer to augment existing energy-based physical models in ‘do novo’ or from-scratch computational protein design, resulting in a 10-fold increase in success rates verified in the lab for binding a designed protein with its target protein. Music Credit: Raro Bueno, Chuzausen freemusicarchive.org/music/Chuzausen/ Story link: https://tacc.utexas.edu/news/latest-news/2023/08/03/deep-learning-for-new-protein-design/

Seaside, Oregon is focus of study for community resilience from hazardous earthquakes and tsunamis. Environmental data that included buildings, ground movement, and demographics were collected in work recognized with a 2023 DesignSafe Dataset Award.

The ARkStorm 2.0 simulations build upon a scenario developed in 2010 by the US Geological Survey, where large atmospheric rivers dump extreme quantities of rainfall over California and cause widespread flooding.

Deep learning models developed in task-DyVa framework to generate realistic cognitive response time data.

Conditions mapped for the first time of polaron characteristics in 2D materials.

Origin of ultra-massive black holes revealed through supercomputer simulations.

The Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX) announced their first publicly released catalog of astronomical objects.

New kind of exciton discovered with novel characteristics in moiré crystal superlattice.

New mechanism determined for passive transport of biomolecules through the nuclear pore complex of cells.