During the 2018 Engineering Open House, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications is giving a behind-the-scenes look at supercomputers and how they are used.

These tours were also offered at last year’s open house, Tiffany Jolley, strategic content specialist for the NCSA, said in an email.

“The process is a self-guided tour, so everyone can go at their own pace,” Jolley said. “We will have NCSA staff available throughout the National Petascale Computing Facility (NPCF) to answer any questions.”

The open house will take place this Friday and Saturday. The behind-the-scenes look will take place Saturday at the NPCF.

“Visitors to NPCF can learn about the history of supercomputers at NCSA, learn about how the Blue Waters supercomputer is used, how to get allocations and different kinds of research that have used Blue Waters (The Dark Energy Survey, for example),” Jolley said. “We will also exhibit our iForge computing cluster designed specifically for NCSA’s industry partners.”

The supercomputers are able to do more than 13 quadrillion calculations per second, and Blue Waters is one of most powerful supercomputers in the world.

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