Welcome to the ASU Core Facilities Newsletter. We are ready to support all your research goals. Please follow our LinkedIn page for additional resources and community information.

Core of the Month: Eyring Materials Center

The Eyring Materials Center and Life Science Electron Microscopy facility recently upgraded their resources for electron microscopy.

Thermofisher Talos L120C Transmission Electron Microscope

In August, the Thermofisher Talos L120C transmission electron microscope went online, allowing imaging of thin section (<100 nm) samples in resin or nanoparticles and small molecules at either ambient or cryotemperatures. The Talos can run at voltages between 60 and 120kV and features a low-dose mode to reduce beam damage in delicate samples.

Leica Ice High Pressure Freezer

The new Leica Ice High Pressure Freezer, installed in November, is an efficient, user-friendly system which can high-pressure freeze a wide variety of samples such as adherent cells or cell suspensions, in rapid succession.

News & Events

Core Facilities state-of-the-art equipment

The university's Core Research Facilities offer state-of-the-art equipment available for public use. Click the title above to learn more about the potential and opportunities this research lab can provide for your future!

Fanuc Robocut C400IC Wire EDM

We here at the Instrument Design Fabrication core research facility are very excited to announce that the order for our Fanuc Robocut C4400IC wire EDM has arrived! Special thanks to Hunter Machine Moving for the careful placement of our machine and also to Methods Machine Tools for helping us order the right equipment for our in-house machine shop needs.

Publications

Hydrogel Injection Molding to Generate Complex Encapsulation Geometries

Hydrogel injection molding capitalizes on the reproducibility, efficiency, and scalability of the injection molding process, and we adapt this technique to biofabrication using a library of natural and synthetic hydrogels with varied crosslinking chemistries and kinetics.

Core Fun Facts: Philips EM100

ASU's first electron microscope, the Philips EM100, installed in 1962, had a resolution of 80,000x magnification and 15 A (angstroms). Today our aberration-corrected TEMs can achieve a resolution of 0.7 A.

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ASU Research Computing will be sponsoring a two-day expo to prepare students, staff, and faculty for usage of the ASU supercomputer. The intent of this Expo is to inspire and motivate our research community to use Research Computing's supercomputing systems and to showcase the important applications of these powerful resources. This event will include in-depth & interactive training for vital topics such as using the web portal, the Linux command line, the software module system, job submission, job benchmarking, job profiling, job monitoring, tools for submitting a large number of jobs, as well as how to leverage hardware such as graphics processing units (GPUs) and high memory nodes.

This year, we will feature Keynote Speaker Dr. John Gustafson, an American computer scientist and businessman, chiefly known for his work in High Performance Computing (HPC) such as the invention of Gustafson's Law, introducing the first commercial computer cluster, measuring with QUIPS, leading the reconstruction of the Atanasoff-Berry Computer, and several awards for computer speedup.

Date & Time: August 1st to 2nd, 2022, 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM, Memorial Union (Alumni Room)

Register at https://researchacademy.asu.edu/events/2022-08-01/2022-research-computing-expo

Questions? Please contact Research Computing at rtshelp@asu.edu.

Register for the upcoming July Research Computing Workshop, "Simplifying Data Transfers with Globus" scheduled on July 25, from 1:00-2:00 PM. 

The ASU Research Computing supercomputer hosts a high-speed scratch filesystem to quickly compute results in addition to 100 GB of storage in users' own personal home directories. When these filesystems become full, the performance of the supercomputer is impacted which can potentially cause system outages. Using Globus, this workshop will interactively teach users how to transfer data from their scratch or home directories.

In preparation for this training, all attendees are encouraged to obtain an account to access ASU Research Computing's resources if they do not already have one.

Quantum Tech, Coming Soon
March 1, 2022 from 3:00-4:00 PM
Zoom coordinates to be provided upon registration. 

There has been tremendous progress in recent years in quantum tech, which has the potential to impact many industries. Stefan will review the progress in quantum tech and highlight promising real-world applications in areas such as medical imaging and diagnostics, ​​communications, cybersecurity, and positioning and navigation to name a few (hint: not everything is about quantum computing!). 

The potential of quantum tech and its ecosystems can only be realized if there is a push for inclusive workforce education to train a new generation of talent to build and take advantage of these quantum technological tools and resources. In addition, there is a need for partnerships between universities, industry (large and small), and the government to advance quantum technology to the next level.

About Stefan Leichenauer, Ph.D.

Stefan is a researcher with a background in physics who works on real-world applications of AI and quantum technologies. He received his Ph.D. in Physics from UC Berkeley and has held positions in Physics at UC Berkeley and Caltech as a leading researcher. Stefan has also worked at Alphabet as Research Scientist and Engineering Lead. Learn more about Stefan and his scholarly work below:

LinkedIn

Google Scholar

All are welcome to attend! Please register here to join us for this event.

ASU Research Computing, part of the Knowledge Enterprise’s Research Technology Office, is a state-of-the-art supercomputing facility that features large-scale computing power that is freely accessible to all ASU faculty and students. In Spring 2022, ASU Research Computing will bring online a new multi-million-dollar supercomputer that will feature approximately 200 Graphical Processing Units (GPUs). This is in addition to the existing supercomputer, Agave.

What does this mean?

To demonstrate the power of this new cluster, consider this: The cluster will have the computational power to perform as many calculations in one second as a human could perform in 28 million years using a hand calculator!

The accelerated performance of GPUs executing those same calculations would take a human nearly 190 million years! Many scientists rely on these powerful supercomputing systems to analyze large amounts of data and solve significant scientific problems. Below is a real-life example of the impact on science and discovery.

Large scale genome sequencing for childhood movement disorders at ASU

Cerebral palsy (CP) is a neurodevelopmental disorder that presents with significant motor disability afflicting 1 in 354 children in the United States. The Medicaid cost for a child with CP is 10 times higher than a child without CP (CDC data). Many children with CP also have concomitant neurological disorders including intellectual disability, autism, and epilepsy. Michael Kruer, MD, is a practicing pediatric neurologist and neurogeneticist at Phoenix Children’s Hospital and an adjunct associate professor at ASU. His lab, led by bioinformatics scientist Sheetal Shetty, Ph.D. (faculty associate, ASU West), is studying genetic factors that can cause CP. A seminal paper published by the Kruer lab group in Nature Genetics (PMID: 32989326) identified dozens of genes that contribute to CP, as well as pathways crucial for normal motor development.

ASU’s high performance computing infrastructure, including NVIDIA’s Parabricks genomics pipeline, are crucial to the lab’s ongoing work. These approaches use network-based analytics and machine learning tools to identify key genes and pathways that lead to CP. The lab is also recruiting 1,000 families from around the country to the ‘Genetic Causes of CP Study’ by using a novel electronic recruiting and consenting application aptly named “iConsent.” We encourage everyone to kindly visit the Kruer lab web page to learn more.

ASU Research Computing Fun Facts

Did you know ASU’s supercomputer delivered nearly 100 million CPU-hours of computing in 2021?

What does that really mean? 

It would take a modern laptop or personal computer millions of years to complete a similar amount of computation.

• ASU’s supercomputer completed more than 6 million individual scientific analyses, or “compute jobs,” in 2021. 
• ASU Research Computing provided approximately 40 trainings and had more than 400 unique workshop attendees in 2021.
• In 2021, more than 200 unique individuals ran 176,970 Matlab programs. More than 200 unique users ran 195,662 R programs on ASU’s supercomputer.