Podcasts
Welcome to the XSEDE podcast page! Below are a few audio-recorded feature news segments about XSEDE science success stories.
Supercomputing Black Hole Jets
How to See Living Machines
Kelly Gaither Starts Advanced Computing for Social Change
SOYBEAN SCIENCE BLOOMS WITH SUPERCOMPUTERS
It takes a supercomputer to grow a better soybean. A project called the Soybean Knowledge Base, or SoyKB for short, wants to do just that. Scientists at the University of Missouri-Columbia developed SoyKB. They say they've made SoyKB a publicly-available web resource for all soybean data, from molecular data to field data that includes several analytical tools.
SoyKB has grown to be used by thousands of soybean researchers in the U.S. and beyond. They did it with the support of XSEDE, the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment, funded by the National Science Foundation. The SoyKB team needed XSEDE resources to sequence and analyze the genomes of over a thousand soybean lines using about 370,000 core hours on the Stampede supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center. They're since moved that work from Stampede to Wrangler, TACC's newest data-intensive system. And they're getting more users onboard with an allocation on XSEDE's Jetstream, a fully configurable cloud environment for science.
Host Jorge Salazar interviews Trupti Joshi and Dong Xu of the University of Missouri-Columbia; and Mats Rynge of the University of Southern California.
Feature Story: www.tacc.utexas.edu/-/soybean-scien…-supercomputers
Recovering Lost History
The story in this podcast revolves around a collaboration of social scientists, humanities scholars, and digital researchers directed at using advanced computing to find and understand the historical experiences of Black women by searching two massive databases (HathiTrust and JSTOR)for written works from the 18th through the 20th centuries. The team also is developing a common toolbox that can help other digital humanities projects.
The research is supported by the National Science Foundation's eXtreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), the preeminent collection of integrated digital resources and services in the world. (xsede.org)
Participating in the podcast's discussion are the following: Ruby Mendenhall, an associate professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and the project's principal investigator; Nicole M. Brown, a postdoctoral researcher at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA); Michael Black, an assistant professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell; and Mark Vanmoer, a senior visualization programmer at NCSA.
Links to stories that have been written about this project:
Tiny Zaps, Big Results: Laser–Materials Research with Guest Leonid Zhigilei
The "small talk" of researchers in nanotechnology is extremely small. Their interest is in the physical phenomena occurring with things one-billionth of a meter in size, a million times shorter than the length of an ant, and up to 100,000 times thinner than a human hair. But the benefits to society of the science, engineering, and technology they're doing at such tiny scales are huge.
In fact, more than 800 everyday commercial products rely on nanoscale materials and processes, according to the National Nanotechnology Initiative (nano.gov). A central aspect of nanotechnology is that it allows essential structures of materials to be tailored to achieve specific properties that improve a variety of applications in medicine, energy, information technology, and many other areas.
One method of nanotechnology research involves the use of short laser pulses at minuscule fractions of a second to produce structural changes in thin, localized surface regions of various materials, such as gold, silver, or silicon.
Leonid Zhigilei, who heads the Computational Materials Research Group at the University of Virginia, says via telephone in this podcast that what attracted him to this type of research is the ability of lasers to excite and change materials in ways not possible with any other technique.
DIrect link to story: https://www.nics.tennessee.edu/zhigilei-laser-nanotechnology