TEXAS ADVANCED COMPUTING CENTER

Stampede enabled researchers from The University of Texas at Austin to study mantle convection — the fundamental physical process responsible for the thermal and geological evolution of the planet — in unprecedented detail. The research, funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy, helped answer one of the "10 Grand Research Questions in Earth Sciences" and showcased Stampede's ability to solve problems involving extremely large partial differential equations, which are common throughout science. The effort merited Johann Rudi and Omar Ghattas the 2015 ACM Gordon Bell Prize, given in recognition of outstanding achievement in high-performance computing.

The Stampede team assisted the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in detecting gravitational waves for the first time in 2016. Stampede assisted prior to the detection by helping LIGO reprocess their data, improve their software, and simulate the likely signatures of black hole mergers, which cause gravitational waves. Once the detection was made, Stampede helped process the analysis and reviewed the results. These efforts ultimately confirmed the first-ever gravitational wave detections, which validated predictions made by Albert Einstein over a century earlier.

Computational biophysicist Rommie Amaro from the University of California, San Diego, used Stampede to create the largest atomic-level model of the tumor suppression protein p53 to date — over 1.5 million atoms. The simulations identified new "pockets" that can be used to reactivate p53, which is frequently disabled by cancer. The findings offer insights into the function of p53 at a scale and resolution previously unknown and provide a tremendous boost for future anti-cancer drug discovery efforts.