When Delta, the newest supercomputing system to reside at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, became operational in 2022, I reached out to Tim Boerner, Co-Principal Investigator and Deputy Project Director, to learn more about what this system was designed to do. He said, in short:
Delta will be used by researchers across the nation to help them answer these big questions that come up in their research. It will do this with its substantial computing power and ability to move large amounts of data around inside the system.
NCSA recently shared a real world example of this very thing. Jodi Hadden-Perilla is a former post-doc at U of I, and is currently a professor of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of Delaware. Her research involves studying the virus that causes Hepatitis B to come up with a treatment that will keep it from causing further complications. She and collaborator Gino Cingolani, a professor of biochemistry and molecular genetics at the University of Alabama, are utiliting the Delta system to study how the virus might act when it encounters human cells, without actually studying it in human cells. From the NCSA article:
Studying these viral interactions with human cells in real time would be extraordinarily difficult, but supercomputers like Delta are designed specifically to assist in this type of research. Delta’s GPU-based architecture makes it ideal for simulation work. Hadden-Perilla is familiar with using supercomputing resources in her work from her time at UIUC working with the historic Blue Waters. She knew the simulations would provide the perfect tool for her team to make progress on their research.
Hadden-Perilla’s research is published in Science Advances.