Arizona High Performance Computing in the News

April 20, 2020
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NASA concept illustration of WFIRST instrument

UITS Research Technologies has been featured in two very different arenas recently—one in scientific papers on running simulations for NASA's next space telescope and one in an interview on the journey to an HPC career. 

Running Simulations for Next Generation Space Telescope

NASA is preparing to launch the NASA WFIRST mission in 2025 to increase viewing capability 100 times over the 30-year-old Hubble Space Telescope.

University of Arizona Department of Astronomy & Steward Observatory and Department of Physics researchers are among the international investigators who will be using the instrument for dark energy research.

Researchers are already preparing by calculating and simulating what WFIRST will be capable of in order to optimize their surveys and set parameters for the research they will be able to do. These calculations and simulations are running on the Research Data Center's high performance comuters (HPCs) on the Computer Center first floor. 

Authors acknowledged UITS in their papers: High Performance Computing (HPC) resources supported by the University of Arizona TRIF, UITS, and RDI and maintained by the UA Research Technologies department.

The papers are currently preprints that have been submitted to the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The Journey to an HPC Career

For a more personal look at life in computational research, follow the long and winding road Sara Willis took to reach her position as a Research Computing Specialist for Research Technologies' HPC systems. Science Node, partnering with Women in HPC, published an interview with Sara describing her unlikely path to UITS Research Computing. 

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