We report preliminary results on the chiral and deconfinement aspects of the
QCD transition at finite temperature using the Highly Improved Staggered Quark
(HISQ) action on lattices with temporal extent of N_{\tau}=6 and 8. The chiral
aspects of the transition are studied in terms of quark condensates and the
disconnected chiral susceptibility. We study the deconfinement transition in
terms of the strange quark number susceptibility and the renormalized Polyakov
loop. We made continuum estimates for some quantities and find reasonably good
agreement between our results and the recent continuum extrapolated results
obtained with the stout staggered quark action.Comment: Talk presented by P. Petreczky at workshop Dense Matter 2010, April
6-9, Stellenbosch, South Africa, to be published in the proceeding