Narayanan’s research to decode how atoms move and interact within these materials requires hundreds of computer simulations, but the work can now progress much faster thanks to a new high-performance computing (HPC) system at UofL. The system allows Narayanan’s team to develop machine learning tools that will perform these simulations much more rapidly.

The “Zurada” HPC system, launched in late 2025, enables Narayanan and researchers across the university to conduct more advanced research in materials development, personalized medicine, AI and many other fields. The blazing fast and versatile system yields rapid solutions to a wide variety of complex computational problems and once programmed, can even perform and analyze a sequence of computer models autonomously. The researchers then assess the final results to move forward with physical experiments.

The system represents a $3.7-million computing investment that significantly enhances the university’s capabilities and will help UofL achieve its strategic research goals.

“This new HPC system represents a monumental leap forward for UofL’s research and development initiatives,” said Jon Klein, executive vice president for research and innovation. “Its processing power, combined with dedicated AI acceleration and ultra-fast networking, will empower our students, faculty and researchers to achieve breakthroughs faster and explore new frontiers previously beyond our reach.”

The materials Narayanan is testing have the potential to significantly improve the next generation of storage batteries over current lithium-ion technology. Narayanan,��associate professor of mechanical engineering in the , is modeling batteries that use iron and aluminum – inexpensive and abundant elements – and sustainable electrolytes, containing simple salts and water.

With Zurada HPC, Narayanan can run the models much more rapidly than with previous systems. He also believes the system has excellent potential to accelerate research in autonomous experimentation.

“We can develop AI models that decide what experiments to run, how to run them and how to analyze the results of those experiments,” Narayanan said. “Most of the heavy lifting is done by AI, and human scientists can come in once every so often to supervise. This platform can get results much faster.”

Using existing approaches, Narayanan said it would take 10 to 15 years to bring a commercial battery product such as the ones he is working on to market. He estimated that autonomous experiments and testing capability with Zurada HPC could shorten that time to 3 to 4 years.

Narayanan also uses the HPC system in his research on metal-insulator transitions in complex oxides, which can be used for preparing the building blocks – called memristors – for brain-like computing platforms.

“We are trying to understand the atomic processes that dictate how the same material can switch from being an insulator to a metal when a voltage is applied.” Narayanan said. “Interestingly, when the direction of voltage is flipped, they turn back to insulators again. These materials hold a lot of potential in mimicking the neurons of the human brain.”

The Zurada HPC system also empowers UofL researchers to advance cutting-edge artificial intelligence research inspired by its namesake, . A professor of electrical and computer engineering at UofL, Zurada is known for his pioneering research in neural networks – a core technology of today’s AI – since the 1990s and has since become one of the world’s in computer engineering, according to data compiled by the global academic publishing and information analytics company Elsevier.

, associate professor in the and a former PhD student of Professor Zurada, is using Zurada HPC for AI research in personalized medicine.

“A lot of my work involves time consuming and computationally heavy AI model training, fine-tuning and simulation,” Gaweda said. “With the Zurada HPC, I will be able to run multiple such jobs in parallel, thereby accelerating the generation of new results.”

For one project, Gaweda is collaborating with in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences to develop tools for individualized treatment of eating disorders. He also relies on Zurada HPC in his project on AI-powered discovery of treatments and interventions to slow progression of chronic kidney disease.

Technical specifications

The various servers that comprise the Zurada HPC system have different “personalities,” each suited for specific kinds of computation and projects, according to Ritu Arora, associate vice provost of . The system consists of 119 servers and features a powerful blend of blazing fast CPUs, 43 NVIDIA GPUs, very large memory servers, ultra-fast 200 gigabits-per-second networking and 5 petabytes of high-performance storage.

The system is capable of more than 1.6 petaflops��of double-precision performance. “Peta” in petaflops refers to��a quadrillion (1,000,000,000,000,000). “Flops” are floating-point operations per second, or the number of math problems (like 4.5 x 1.2) the system can solve every second.

In other words, Zurada HPC can perform more than 1.6 quadrillion calculations every second.

To understand the magnitude of this capability, imagine if each of the approximately eight billion people on Earth performed one calculation every second. It would take them more than 55 hours to do what this machine can do in one second. This kind of speed is necessary to solve complex problems with billions of interacting variables, such as research in drug discovery, cybersecurity, AI and high-performance materials development.

Researchers can learn more about using the system .

The University of Louisville doctoral candidate just at the IEEE Conference on Manipulation, Automation and Robotics at Small Scales (MARSS 2018), held in Nagoya, Japan in early July.

His paper, “,” focuses on research conducted at UofL’s . He’s studying how to build a better AFAM micro-robot — one small enough to manufacture nanotechnologies, or even manipulate cells to cure disease.

Zhang’s paper was chosen from among eight finalists, a list that included students from University of Michigan, University of Pennsylvania, and University of California Berkeley, among others.

“Winning the conference is a great matter to me,” he said. “I didn’t realize this idea was worth any award when I came up with it; it was only a small modification to make AFAM (robot) better.”

The bottom line is that, in order to make tiny things, the workers themselves need to be tiny. It’s an idea Zhang became enamored with after he was introduced to the tiny bots by a fellow student.

“The small size, the mechanism, the intriguing design and exquisite structures took my heart,” he said.

As a doctoral student at UofL, Zhang works under Dr. Dan Popa at the Next Generation Systems robotics lab in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. There, Zhang was introduced to the AFAM, a micro-robot created by Dr. Popa and colleagues 10 years ago.

Zhang’s paper focuses on his research into how best to resolve issues with the AFAM, including its difficult assembly and failure rate. Popa said he was very proud of Zhang’s work and award.��

“He worked hard on all aspects of the paper, conducted both simulation and experiments, and wrote down his results,” Popa said.�� “I think it speaks well for the research dedication of our students and for the quality of engineering graduate programs here at Speed School.”��

As for Zhang, he’s now working on a way to direct the bots using lasers. After he finishes his PhD at UofL, he’s planning to continue his research, either working with industry or at a university.

“This field is very active and there are new developments everyday,” he said. “I’m excited about it.”

What does the city of the future look like?

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Well, it’s smart. Really smart — sort of like the students who participated in the DerbyHacks hackathon this past weekend.��

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More than 100 hackers spent 36 straight hours at the University of Louisville Engineering Garage, 1960 Arthur St., developing creative software and hardware along the smart cities theme. ����

Some hacks were practical, some whimsical. One team taught Amazon’s Alexa smart assistant to play chess, while others used open data to create grocery lists or map the best places to buy a home, accounting for crime rates and other factors.����

“We saw lots of great people making lots of great projects,” said DerbyHacks director, Shayne Hemminger. “My personal favorite hack involved trying to emulate old vector display video games.”��

There’s a full list of projects and winners��, on the DerbyHacks website.��

The second annual hackathon was organized by University of Louisville students, with help from outside organizations.��

“Derbyhacks was a great success, it took a lot of effort from a lot of people to pull of this event,” said Sam Nwosu, a computer science and computer engineering graduate student and president of��,��the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) student chapter.��“I really enjoyed the smartdollhouse project and the newsforme project. Both were very creative and had a lot of work put in it.”��

The����sponsored the event, along with Humana Inc., KFC, the city’s Office of Performance Improvement and Innovation and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. The UofL����was a partner, as were Major League Hacking, ACM and Linode.

“We’re starting to see more intellectual jobs being automated and once we get to the human level, everything goes,” Yampolskiy says. “The prediction is, something like, 2045 is the likely time when machines will do the same things most humans do.” �� ��

Watch more on Yampolskiy’s��research:��