After 10 years of service to the national science and engineering community, the TeraGrid project has ended. It has been replaced by XSEDE, Extreme Science and Engineering Digital Environment. The TeraGrid project recently published a brochure of the science highlights for 2010, and they cover the following topics:
- XD: The Future is Now(PDF)
- Hearts Go Wild(PDF)
- Finding a Leader in a Crowd(PDF)
- In Sequence(PDF)
- How Spiders Spin Silks of Superhero Strength(PDF)
- Solving an Earth-Sized Jigsaw Puzzle(PDF)
- When Cellular Bones Soften(PDF)
- Oil, Oil Everywhere(PDF)
- Counting Comets(PDF)
- The Need for Nanospeed(PDF)
- Decoding Deafness(PDF)
- Supercomputer Sheds Light on HIV’s Behavior(PDF)
- Dawn of the Giants(PDF)
- Cloud Computing -Literally(PDF)
- Asking “What If ?” About H1N1(PDF)
- Data Mining New Materials(PDF)
Two chapters will interest astronomers. “Counting Comets” describes how Tom Quinn and Nathan Kaib used 500,000 hours of CPU Time to show that the Oort cloud contains a mere trillion comets, an order of magnitude less theorized. “Dawn of the Giants” describes how Richard Durlsen performed simulations of the formation of gas giant planets. The simulations show that for sufficiently extended and massive disks, gas giant planets can form via direct collapse caused by gravitational instabilities on a time scale of thousands
rather than millions of years.
Astronomy Computing Today 