Texas ECE student Otitoaleke Akinola won the Best Poster Award at the Inaugural TACC Symposium for Texas Researchers. Akinola, a nanoelectronics researcher and Ph.D. student at UT Austin, works in the Integrated Nano Computing Lab with Dr. Jean Anne Incorvia.

In September 2018, more than 100 computational scientists and students from 16 Texas academic institutions and six industry partners met in Austin for the inaugural TACC Symposium for Texas Researchers (TACCSTER), a chance for scholars to showcase their research involving TACC resources, learn new and useful computing skills, network with other Texas-based researchers, and hear about the latest TACC systems and services.

Akinola's poster described micromagnetic modeling of three terminal magnetic tunnel junctions that can potentially act as controllable synapses. The researchers employed graphic processor units on the Lonestar5 supercomputer which helped cut down processing time by a factor of nearly 100. The work is helping to design the core building blocks of bioinspired computing.

"I found the TACC symposium particularly interesting because it was an opportunity to meet people who work in research areas that are totally out of my domain," Akinola said. "What is even more fascinating is seeing how different people use the supercomputers and clusters available at TACC to do research ranging from geophysics to rocket science. I was impressed by how much support and resources the TACC staff was willing to provide to ensure smooth research work.