NERSC Helps Develop Next-Generation Batteries
12.18.12 As part of DOE's Batteries and Energy Storage Hub, researchers will use NERSC resources to predict the properties of electrolytes—liquid solutions that conduct ions between battery plates and aid in energy storage. When the center is up and running, collaborators will combine their results with the existing Materials Project to get a complete scope of battery components. Together these tools allow them to employ a systematic and predictive approach to battery design.
Wes Bethel Is ACM Distinguished Scientist
12.12.12 Wes Bethel, leader of the Visualization Group in CRD, has been named an ACM Distinguished Scientist. The Distinguished Scientist level recognizes "Those ACM members with at least 15 years of professional experience who have achieved significant accomplishments or have made a significant impact on the computing field."
Kathy Yelick Named ACM Fellow for Contributions to Parallel Languages
12.11.12 Associate Lab Director for Computing Sciences Kathy Yelick has been named a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). Yelick was named an ACM Fellow "For contributions to parallel languages that improve programmer productivity."
Yelick was one of 52 ACM Fellows announced Tuesday, December 11.
A Pharmaceutical Screening Strategy to Capture Carbon Dioxide
12.06.12 Crystalline porous materials, like zeolites, are widely used to purify water and separate gases. But scientists believe that these structures have the potential to do a lot more—like capturing CO2 from the emissions of coal-burning power plants before it reaches the atmosphere and contributes to global warming. By combining novel tools developed by Berkeley Lab computational researchers, with a screening strategy inspired by the pharmaceutical industry, researchers can now quickly find the right porous structures to effectively do this job.
John Shalf Is Named Chief Technology Officer for NERSC
12.05.12 John Shalf has been named the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) the (NERSC Division at Berkeley Lab. As CTO, Shalf will help NERSC develop a plan to achieve exascale performance—1 quintillion or 1018 computer operations per second—a thousand-fold increase over current petascale systems. Exascale is expected to require computers containing 10 million to 100 million processing elements or cores, as well as new programming techniques and software.
Phase 1 of Edison Arrives at NERSC
11.27.12 Phase 1 of NERSC's newest supercomputer, named Edison, was delivered on November 27, 2012. The architecture is a Cray XC30 ("Cascade") and it will be installed in two phases. When it is fully installed in 2013, Edison will have a peak performance of more than 2 petaflops (10 15 floating point operations per second). The integrated storage system will have more than 6 petabytes of storage with an I/O bandwidth of 140 gigabytes per second. The system is named after U.S. inventor and businessman Thomas Alva Edision.
ESnet5 Deployment Team Named as "Fierce" Innovators
11.27.12 The ESnet5 Deployment Team, charged with rolling out the 100 Gigabit per second national network that entered production in November, has been named to the first annual "Fierce 15" list of the top federal employees and teams who have done particularly innovative things. The list was announced Nov. 27 by Fierce Government, a newsletter covering the U.S. government.
The Breaking Points of Metallic Glasses
11.26.12 Using novel computational techniques developed by Christopher Rycroft of Berkeley Lab's Computational Research Division (CRD), researchers now have a better idea about why metallic glass alloys, or liquid metals, made with a variety of techniques have such wildly different toughness and breaking points. For the first time, these models are also in qualitative agreement with laboratory experiments.
