Stories

Galaxies are widely considered the basic building blocks of our Universe. Therefore, it is crucial to understand them to gain insight into the Universe. Cosmological hydrodynamic simulations are an increasingly popular method to study galaxy formation and evolution. In this user story Maarten Baes, prof. astrophysics at Ghent University explains how supercomputing is essential for their cosmological simulations.  

Martin Grignard (University of Liège) developed new simulation software, called Shamo. This package smoothly interfaces with existing tools to easily simulate the propagation of electromagnetic waves through the brain. Indeed, while this propagation is the basis of different medical techniques, interpreting the data correctly requires to take into account the complexity and uniqueness of each head.

Xavier Fettweis (University of Liege) developed a regional climate MAR model. In this user story Xavier explains how this model can be used on the CECI’s and Cenaero supercomputers to study the changes due to global warming, a challenging topic with extremely important implications.

Air pollution forms a threat to our health and environment. Thus, it is important that the quality of the air we breathe is closely monitored. In this user story Charlotte Vanpoucke and David Roet explain how the VSC HPC infrastructure is essential for the reporting of air quality for the whole of Belgium. The HPC infrastructure of the VSC makes it possible to accomplish the yearly calculations for the air quality maps within a week.

Thanks to a multidisciplinary approach involving crystallographic studies and simulation performed on CECI’s supercomputers, Manon Mirgaux (University of Namur) was able to unravel the dynamic behaviour of the protein hIDO1. This protein is a target for immunotherapy, and understanding its dynamism is a key ingredient towards the design of new drugs, including the treatment of cancer.

The Oosterweelverbinding project was set up to improve the accessibility to the port and the city region of Antwerp by completing the ring road around Antwerp (R1) on the north side. Wouter Lefebvre, researcher at VITO explains how HPC infrastructure was indispensable in providing the calculations for the high-resolution air quality modelling for the Environmental Impact Assessment Report in the context of the Oosterweelverbinding.