Sailing again: UNC’s Topsail supercomputer comes out of retirement with a RENCI makeover

UNC’s Topsail supercomputer comes out of retirement with a RENCI makeover from Erik Scott (left) and Mark Montazer (right).

In its prime, the UNC supercomputer called Topsail had a peak performance of nearly 30 trillion calculations per second—more than enough to earn a spot on the biannual Top500 supercomputers list. Read more

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Project ADAMANT wins CENIC’s 2013 Innovations in Networking award

March 13, 2013 — La Mirada, CA — Project ADAMANT, a collaborative effort of the University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute (USC/ISI), RENCI at UNC Chapel Hill and Duke University, has been honored by the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC) as the recipient of the 2013 Innovations in Networking Award for Experimental/Developmental Applications. Read more

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RENCI researchers offer Voluminous to scientific community

David Borland, PhD, a RENCI senior visualization researcher, and Jeffrey L. Tilson, PhD, a RENCI senior research scientist, today announced the general release of Voluminous, a tool that scientists can use to visualize volumetric data sets. Read more

RENCI taps Ohio HPC expert for deputy director job

CHAPEL HILL, NC – Ashok Krishnamurthy, PhD, director of research and scientific development at the Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC), will join the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) at UNC Chapel Hill as deputy director on Feb. 1, RENCI Director Stan Ahalt, PhD, announced today.

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Shifting Sands: Visualization techniques help NC State researchers understand Outer Banks dune erosion


It takes no more than watching the news to realize that homes and businesses along the U.S. East Coast face dangers from erosion, floods, and monster storms. Although North Carolina escaped most of the havoc caused by Hurricane Sandy, its Outer Banks constitute a vulnerable strip of land. The region’s fragile natural environments and popular tourist attractions are battered every year by tropical storms, nor’easters, and winds that erode beaches, shift sand dunes, degrade dune ridges, wash out roads, and sometimes threaten peoples’ lives and homes. Read more

Carolina Launch Pad company aims to lower high school dropout rate

Julian Wooten of Launchpad

CHAPEL HILL, NC – Julian Wooten holds degrees in biology and chemistry from UNC-Chapel Hill, and nanomedicine from UNC Chapel Hill’s Eshelman School of Pharmacy, and recently decided to pursue an MBA. Read more

International consortium planned to support sustained, robust data management technology

SALT LAKE CITY, Nov. 5, 2012 – A new consortium to be formed by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and members of the Max Planck Society, Germany’s most successful research organization, will work to develop a popular open source data management solution called the integrated Rule-Oriented Data System (iRODS) into a sustained, production-quality technology for data management, sharing and integration. Read more

NSF BIG DATA grant winners include RENCI and UNC researcher

CHAPEL HILL, NC – Arcot Rajasekar, professor at the School of Information and Library Science (SILS) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and chief scientist at the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI), is the principal investigator of one of eight new Big Data research projects receiving awards from the National Science Foundation (NSF) with support from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Read more

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RENCI to lead effort to conceptualize NSF-funded Water Science Software Institute

CHAPEL HILL, NC – RENCI, the Renaissance Computing Institute at UNC Chapel Hill, will receive $729,686 from the National Science Foundation to begin a process that could lead to the development of a multimillion-dollar Water Science Software Institute (WSSI) led by RENCI and UNC Chapel Hill with partners across the U.S. Read more

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UNC startup Gift Boogle acquires MatchServ, selected to demo at CED’s 2012 Tech Venture conference

Above: Gift Boogle CEO Eric McAfee (left), and COO Scott Kleist.

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. – Gift Boogle, a startup out of UNC Chapel Hill, has acquired MatchServ, a provider of web-based matching technology and a former strategic partner. MatchServ’s technology will be integrated into Gift Boogle’s gift matching social media application.

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