By Rob Mitchum // March 20, 2014
This year, the Computation Institute is launching a new series of talks from CI researchers called Inside The Discovery Cloud. The CI’s vision of The Discovery Cloud seeks to make the most powerful computational resources available to research of all scales and disciplines, accelerating the discovery of tomorrow’s critical breakthroughs and innovations. In this series, CI researchers will discuss work on topics ranging from the future of cities to climate change to genomics, using technology from the world’s fastest supercomputers to the common laptop.
On March 20th, our third Inside The Discovery Cloud event focused on Particles to Cosmos, featuring two researchers who design complex computer models to research vastly different scales. John Grime, of the Center for Multiscale Theory and Simulation, studies microsocopic viruses and proteins smaller many times smaller than a cell. Katrin Heitmann, a CI Senior Fellow at Argonne, studies the expansion of the universe, running the largest cosmological simulations ever performed on Argonne’s Mira supercomputer.
In the first talk, Grime takes us through the creation of coarse-grained models which make it possible to perform previously impossible simulations for chemistry, biology, and materials science. Grime himself studies the maturation of HIV, informing experimental work seeking new ways of understanding and fighting the virus.