Researchers reliant on high-performance computing get big boost

Upgrades representing a 40% increase in computing power have been made to the University of Hawaiʻi’s high performance computing (HPC) cluster, called Mana. It is a free computing resource that has been available to faculty, staff and students across all 10 UH campuses since 2014.

Three of Mana’s top users, UH Mānoa Assistant Professor Rui Sun, Associate Professor Philip von Doethinchem and Professor Garrett Apuzen-Ito, tested the new equipment on their current research applications in molecular dynamic simulations, cosmic rays and 3D simulations of Earth’s plate movements, respectively. In all three cases, the researchers reported improvements in computing performance with some applications running twice as fast compared to previous results.

Using around 5,000 CPU years of computational time, the team showed in their recently published Physical Review D article that if the existence of cosmic antihelium (the antimatter counterpart of helium) would be confirmed, it cannot be explained by conventional processes and would be a fundamentally new discovery with potentially profound impact for the understanding of dark matter or Big Bang Nucleosynthesis. According to NASA, “nucleosynthesis” refers to the formation of heavier elements, atomic nuclei with many protons and neutrons, from the fusion of lighter elements.

Read the full story from University of Hawai’i here.