Featured Research: Winter2009
RNA in Biopolymer Nanostructures
Dr. Yara Yingling
and her group in materials science explore biopolymeric
and composite nanoassembly processes.
The NCSU Blade Center enables Dr. Yingling to perform
complex simulations to guide
efforts in synthesis and to analyze properties of biopolymers.
For example, RNA based biopolymers can be used
as nanoarrays and nanocircuits. Dr. Yingling proposes to use
protein-free RNA nanoparticles as efficient
minimally toxic drug delivery devices.
Dr. Yingling and her team
designed an RNA hexagonal nanoring formed from
six simple building blocks held together via loop-loop
contacts. Drugs or therapeutic agents can be incorporated
within or attached to the ends of building blocks. Moreover,
the 3' and 5' sequence can be engineered to facilitate a
self-assembly of these rings into a nanotube.
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Winter 2008 Featured Research
Dr. Blondin's work
was featured in a recent
RESULTS article
.
Astrophysics professor John Blondin recalls staring into the nighttime Wisconsin skies when he was growing up and marveling at the stars. Even as a kid, I can remember being fascinated by the fact that our world here on Earth is such a small piece of the universe, he says. Now, he exudes the same boyish enthusiasm as he marvels at some of the
world's most powerful computers, which are helping him solve a vexing problem of the
universe: How does a supernova explode?
Summer 2006 Featured Research
Dr. Frank Mueller and his research team in the Department
of Computer Science are developing software tools
to tune and scale applications in the
high performance computing area.
The tools detect and alleviate sources of scalability problems and
use runtime/operating system synergy to exploit shared-memory
multi-processors and simultaneous
multithreading for shared memory computing. As multi-core
architectures spread to the desktop (and the laptop),
so does the applicability of their work in shared memory computation.
Spring 2006 Featured Research
Dr. Marco Buongiorno Nardelli in the Department of Physics and
his research group are using first principles
simulations to study the application of carbon nanotubes as
a potential method to produce hydrogen by dissociation of
water. Defects in the carbon lattice structure provide pathways
that significantly reduce the energy required for the dissociation
of water. An economical and
environmentally friendly source of hydrogen could provide
an important future energy source.
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Fall 2005 Featured Research
Dr. Yang Zhang's Air Quality Forecasting Laboratory applies state-of-the-science numerical models
to simulate human-induced air pollution and its impact on human
health, climate, the environment, and society. By using
university HPC resources, the AQF Lab is able to focus on constructing,
improving, and implementing atmospheric modeling systems.
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Spring 2005 Featured Research
The Genome Research Laboratory
transitioned the computationally
intensive processing of sequencer output from an internal cluster
to the university Linux center. By utilizing the university resource
for the computationally intensive work the GRL has been able to
focus their resources on the sequence generation services the
Laboratory provides.
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Winter 2005 Featured Research
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NC State researchers are simulating the death of a massive
star leading to a supernova explosion. Of particular interest
is the dynamics of the shock wave generated by the initial
implosion of the star which ultimately destroys the star
as a highly energetic supernova.
Dr. John Blondin and his research group work with
models of supernova as part of the Department of Energy
sponsored
TeraScale Supernova Initiative. In addition to
NC State HPC resources, the group also uses the
computational resources at Oak Ridge National Laboratory
and, for visualization of model results, their own 22-node Linux cluster.
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Fall 2004 Featured Research
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