The latest news on projects and discoveries within the Computational Research Division and NERSC Division at Berkeley Lab http://www.lbl.gov/cs Some people claim that it's impossible to move those terabytes of data between computing centers and the laboratories or universities where researcher sits. But in a live SC09 demo in which data simulating cosmic structures of the early universe was streamed over a reserved 10-gigabits-per-second provided by the Department of Energy's ESnet (Energy Sciences Network), Mike Norman of the San Diego Supercomputing Center and his graduate assistant Rick Wagner showed it can be done. http://www.lbl.gov/cs/Archive/news112009.html Investigators at IBM Research - Almaden, in collaboration 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 the special category for their development of innovative techniques that produce new levels of performance on a real application. http://www.lbl.gov/cs/Archive/news111609a.html 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. http://www.lbl.gov/cs/Archive/news111809.html IBM and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) announced today that an IBM System x iDataPlex server will run the 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 (DOE). http://www.lbl.gov/cs/Archive/news111609.html SC09, sponsored by ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) and the IEEE Computer Society, showcases the many ways high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis lead to advances in scientific discovery, research, education and commerce. Look out for Berkeley Lab Computing Sciences experts at SC09 technical programs, workshops, tutorials and at booth 723 in the exhibit hall. http://www.lbl.gov/cs/sc09.html 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. http://www.lbl.gov/cs/Archive/news103009.html 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. http://www.lbl.gov/cs/Archive/news103009b.html To ensure that science effectively adapts to the "multicore revolution," NERSC is developing The Computational Science and Engineering Petascale Initiative. http://www.lbl.gov/cs/Archive/news103009a.html 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. Researchers from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Computational Research Division and Los Alamos National Laboratory are collaborating to develop parallel adaptive mesh refinement techniques for the Community Ice Sheet Modeling code known as GLIMMER-CISM. These algorithms will allow researchers to model points of interest, like the retreating edges of ice sheets, at unprecedented resolution. http://www.lbl.gov/cs/CSnews/CSnews103009c.html 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. http://www.lbl.gov/CS/Archive/news102709.html The first phase of the Department of Energy's National Energy Research Scientific Computing center's (NERSC) next-generation supercomputer was delivered to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Oakland Science Facility this month. NERSC awarded the contract for this system to Cray Inc. in August 2009. http://www.lbl.gov/cs/CSnews/CSnews103009a.html Need a job? The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Computing Sciences Division is currently is recruiting for 20 positions! In this video, Berkeley Lab's Sr. Recruiting Consultant Bernadette Cu-Todd offers resume tips for job-seekers. http://www.lbl.gov/cs/ To model for phenomena that can hamper beam quality in Free Electron Laser (FEL) designs, scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory will simulate evolution of the electron beam from its origin to its fate as a photon source with the the Cray XT computer, called Franklin, at NERSC. http://www.lbl.gov/cs/Archive/news101409.html 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. http://ascr-discovery.science.doe.gov/bigiron/fel1.shtml Juan Meza, head of the High Performance Computing Department in Berkeley Lab's Computational Research Division, has been named to Hispanic Business magazine's annual list of 100 influential Hispanics. http://www.lbl.gov/cs/Archive/news100609.html September news highlights from the Berkeley Lab Computing Sciences Division http://www.lbl.gov/cs/CSnews/CSnews_September2009.html As the world’s demand for energy increases, billions of dollars are dedicated to the search for deep-water hydrocarbon reservoirs each year. Now a new 3D imaging software called EMGeo is leveraging the unique capabilities of massively parallel computers to help investigators discriminate between reservoir fluids like oil, gas and brine, more efficiently. http://www.lbl.gov/cs/Archive/news093009.html Storms and blizzards made headlines throughout the late 19th and 20th centuries. But it’s the humble recordings of lows and highs during those unforgettable events that scientists are harvesting now. They hope a computationally intense reanalysis of weather over the past 150 years on will tell them whether today’s storms are more extreme and if climate prediction models can be trusted for this purpose. Much of this work was done on NERSC's Cray XT4, Franklin System. http://ascr-discovery.science.doe.gov/feature/weather1.shtml The precise conditions inside a white dwarf star in the hours leading up to its explosive end as a Type Ia supernova are one of the mysteries confronting astrophysicists studying these massive stellar explosions. But now, a team of researchers, composed of three applied mathematicians at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and two astrophysicists, has created the first full-star simulation of the hours preceding the largest thermonuclear explosions in the universe. http://www.lbl.gov/cs/Archive/news091509.html ESnet Named Government IT Innovator, CRD Researchers Receive Recovery Act Funds to Improve Reliability of Electrical Grid and much more! http://www.lbl.gov/cs/CSnews/CSnews_September2009SE.html InformationWeek magazine honored ESnet as one the top 10 government agency innovators for its work helping thousands of researchers worldwide manage the massive amounts of scientific data stemming from the application of petascale supercomputers and high-precision instruments to cutting-edge disciplines such as climate science and high energy physics. http://www.lbl.gov/cs/Archive/news091609.html CRD's John Bell develops computational techniques that will close the gap between theory and experiment and enable dramatic progress in combustion science. http://ascr-discovery.science.doe.gov/bigiron/bell1.shtml Nanotechnology holds a wealth of potential for major advances in a broad range of energy applications, but developing nanosystems is quite challenging because simulations necessary to understand structures at the nanoscale require tremendous amounts of computational resources. A new algorithm promises to unleash the power of nanotechnology by enabling electronic structure calculations with hundreds of thousands of atoms. http://www.scidacreview.org/0904/html/nano.html Rumors of the death of Moore’s Law are greatly exaggerated, according to a team of computer scientists from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and the University of California (UC)–Berkeley. In their view, Gordon Moore’s observation that the amount of computing power packed onto a chip doubles about every 18 months while the cost remains flat is alive and well. But the physics is changing. http://www.scidacreview.org/0904/html/multicore.html The electrical power demands of ultrascale computers threaten to limit the future growth of computational science. To reach exascale computing cost-effectively, a group of researchers propose to radically change the relationship between machines and applications by developing a tightly-coupled hardware/software co-design process. The Green Flash project is intended to dramatically accelerate the development cycle for exascale systems while decreasing the power requirements. http://www.scidacreview.org/0904/html/hardware.html