Electrical power generation is a multi-billion dollar global business, with developing countries creating a growing demand for the 21st century. To gain an edge in this fiercely competitive market, the key for companies like Westinghouse is more efficient turbines. High performance computing can help design more efficient turbines, by enabling engineers to solve problems involved with real turbine configurations, not just simplified versions. After four months of work, we had code that was more accurate and much faster than its sequential predecessor. Jobs that would have taken three months before now run in less than 12 hours.
Color corresponds to temperature.
Such simulations pinpoint likely blade hot spots, which helps in the design of cooling conduits and blade coatings. In 1996, researchers and physicians at PSC, CMU, and UPMC created and demonstrated a breakthrough capability for viewing the brain during mental activity. This image shows what regions in a subject's brain are involved in a memory task. Dr. Peter Kollman's group at UCSF and other members of the computational structural biology research community resulted in the longest-ever simulation of the protein folding process using parallelized software. This is a snapshot from simulations of a protein called the villin headpiece subdomain.