To meet the increasing demands of parallel scientific applications, supercomputers continue to grow in both scale and complexity. The fastest supercomputer in the world, El Capitan, features over a million CPU cores and tens of thousands of GPUs. Applications running on such large-scale systems are particularly susceptible to system noise or interference caused by the operating system (OS) and other services running on the same compute nodes as the application.

Smoke Water Fire, (2016), is a digital video for stereoscopic virtual reality systems. It is a radiosity rendered computer simulation of the collision of many fluid volumes, and required 8 months to generate. Instead of the forms being rendered as a natural material, though, they are presented in their pure, computational form. By stripping the fluid of its physical context, it can exist in a purely ephemeral, numerical, virtual state.