Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have performed record simulations using all 1,572,864 cores of Sequoia, the largest supercomputer in the world. Sequoia, based on IBM BlueGene/Q architecture, is the first machine to exceed one million computational cores. It also is No. 2 on the list of the world's fastest supercomputers, operating at 16.3 petaflops (16.3 quadrillion floating point operations per second). The simulations are the largest particle-in-cell (PIC) code simulations by number of cores ever performed. PIC simulations are used extensively in plasma physics to model the motion of the charged particles, and the electromagnetic interactions between them, that make up ionized matter. High performance computers such as Sequoia enable these codes to follow the simultaneous evolution of tens…

Autodesk will be the primary sponsor of Purdue University's third International Collegiate evGrandPrix to be held on May 12, opening day weekend at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, home of the Indianapolis 500. The event is an electric go-kart race and engineering design competition involving colleges and universities from around the nation and Europe. "In sponsoring the evGrandPrix, Autodesk is taking a leadership role in educating the next generation of engineers and technical specialists," said James Caruthers, Reilly Professor of Chemical Engineering and director of the Indiana Advanced Electric Vehicle Training and Education Consortium (I-AEVtec). "The evGrandPrix is not just a go-kart race, but it is really an engineering design competition where the students get points from race placement plus their…