StarGate Demo at SC09 Shows How to Keep Astrophysics Data Out of Archival "Black Holes"
11.20.09 During a live demonstration at SC09, Mike Norman of the San Diego Supercomputing Center streamed data simulating cosmic structures of the early universe over a reserved 10-gigabits-per-second provided by the Department of Energy's ESnet (Energy Sciences Network).
First Full-Scale Simulation of Cat-Size Cortex is a Gordon Bell Prize Winner
11.19.09 Investigators at IBM Research-Almaden, in collaboration with Horst Simon of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), have performed the first near real-time cortical simulation of the brain that exceeds the scale of a cat cortex and contains 1 billion spiking neurons and 10 trillion individual learning synapses. Their work was honored with a Gordon Bell Prize in a special category for development of innovative techniques that produce new levels of performance on a real application.
New Consortium to Tackle Challenge of Adapting Scientific Applications to Hybrid Multicore Systems
11.18.09 While hybrid multicore technologies will be a critical component in future high-end computing systems, most of today's scientific applications will require a significant re-engineering effort to take advantage of the resources provided by these systems. To address this challenge, three U.S. Department of Energy national laboratories, including the Berkeley Lab, and two leading universities have formed the Hybrid Multicore Consortium, or HMC.
Berkeley Lab Selects IBM Technology to Power Cloud Computing Research
11.16.09 An IBM System x iDataPlex server will run the Berkeley Lab's program to explore how cloud computing can be used to advance scientific discovery. The program, dubbed Magellan, will be a test bed for NERSC scientists to explore the effectiveness of cloud computing for their particular research problems.The program is funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act through the U.S. Department of Energy.
NERSC Continues Tradition of Cosmic Microwave Background Data Analysis with the Planck Cluster
10.30.09 Armed with a new spacecraft called Planck and supercomputers at NERSC, astronomers around the world hope to make tremendous strides toward illuminating the nature and origins of dark matter and dark energy by creating high-resolution maps of subtle variations in the temperature and polarization of the Cosmic Microwave Background.
NERSC Overcomes Software Challenges for Scientific Computing
10.30.09 As chip manufacturers are turning more towards multi-core architectures, which pack increasing numbers of cores onto the chip, programmers must rethink the basic models of algorithm development and parallel programming. To ensure that science effectively adapts to the "multicore revolution," NERSC is developing The Computational Science and Engineering Petascale Initiative.
Berkeley Lab Researchers Prepare Climate Community for 100-Gbps Transfers
10.30.09 Climate 100 will help ensure that the climate research community effectively uses the planned 100 gigabit-per-second networks. This project will bring together middleware and network researchers to develop the needed tools and techniques for moving unprecedented amounts of climate data.
B-ISICLES (Berkeley Ice Sheet Initiative for Climate at Extreme Scales) Project to Improve Accuracy of Ice Sheet Models
10.30.09 One of the most-cited examples of global climate change is retreating ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland. But the details of how fast they are melting is a mystery that may be solved with a new generation of computer simulations.
It's Not Too Late
10.27.09 Computer simulations on more than 2000 processors of Franklin, the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center's (NERSC) Cray XT4 system, as well as computers at the Oak Ridge and Argonne Leadership Computing Facilities and at National Center for Atmospheric Research show that cuts in greenhouse gas emissions would save arctic ice, reduce sea level rise.
DOE to Explore Scientific Cloud Computing at Argonne, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories
10.14.09 Cloud computing is gaining traction in the commercial world, but can such an approach also meet the computing and data storage demands of the nation's scientific community? A new Department of Energy program will examine cloud computing as a cost-effective and energy-efficient computing paradigm for scientists to accelerate discoveries in a variety of disciplines.
