Professor Morten Smedskjær has been granted 10 million computer hours on the supercomputer Vega over the next 12 months via the EuroHPC Regular Access Program. This is one of AAU's largest high-performance computing grants ever, and it will open new possibilities for Smedskjær’s team.

It is costly to make realistic simulations of materials, and researchers are often forced to make simplified simulations. But with these new muscles from The European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking, Morten Smedskjær and his team can now simulate larger systems over a longer period of time and thereby get closer to simulating real-world conditions.

For studying breakage of glass materials, simulating real-world conditions is crucial. Aid from a supercomputer can help accelerate the screening of new materials, and thus faster discover new promising materials in the laboratory.

Up until now, computer simulations have mostly been used to understand existing experimental results, but rarely been used to guide new experiments on glasses. Now – with Vega – Smedskjær’s team hope to speed up the discovery process significantly. They will do so by simulating glasses before synthesizing them in the laboratory.

Smedskjær’s proposal was amongst the 47 evaluated under the EuroHPC Regular Access call.