Top Stories:

Listening to Earth Breathe with 500 Towers

It takes a global village to monitor and analyze trends in Earth’s “breathing”—or the exchange of carbon dioxide, water vapor and energy between plants and the planet’s atmosphere. Hundreds of science groups have planted more than 500 micrometeorological towers across five continents to monitor these exchanges every 30 minutes. And with the help of database specialists in Berkeley Lab's CRD, all of this data can now be consolidated for analysis via an online portal called Fluxdata.org. More>

Speeding Up Models of Table-top Accelerators

Particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider at CERN are the big rock stars of high-energy physics—really big. But, a recent breakthrough in computer modeling may help hasten the day when accelerators thousands of times more powerful can be built in a fraction of the space—and for significantly less money. Researchers computing at NERSC have sped up by a factor of hundreds the modeling, and thus the design of experimental laser wakefield accelerators. More>

Dancing in the Dark: Scientists Shed New Light on Protein-Salt Interactions

To study nanostructures in real environments, Berkeley Lab scientists have combined theoretical and experimental approaches to glimpse into a protein’s interaction with simple salts in water. Enabled by x-ray absorption simulation software developed at Berkeley Lab’s Molecular Foundry, these findings shed new light on how salts impact protein structure at the atomic level. Computational resources for this work were provided by NERSC. More>

Jonathan Carter Named New Deputy for Berkeley Lab Computing Sciences

Jonathan Carter, who has led NERSC's User Services Group since 2005, has been named the new Computing Sciences Deputy, succeeding Michael Banda, who joined the Advanced Light Source earlier this year.

"Jonathan's training as a computational scientist, his work in directly supporting NERSC users, and his experience in leading the recent procurement of Hopper, NERSC's next supercomputing system, made him an ideal candidate for this position," said Horst Simon, Associate Lab Director for Computing Sciences. More>

NewsBytes:

New to Berkeley Lab Computing Sciences

Introducing: Weiquin Zhang, John Owens and Filipe Maia. More>

PHOTOSTORY: Computational Summer School at NERSC

Researchers with scientific backgrounds ranging from astrophysics to biochemistry attended the first-ever Computational Science Summer School at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) in Oakland, Calif. from August 2-6, where they learned how to use manycore devices like Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) for scientific computing. The five-day summer session was hosted by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's new International Center for Computational Science, in collaboration with the Virtual School for Computational Science and Engineering. More>

Math Group’s Persson, Wilkening Win Early Career Awards

Per-Olof Persson and Jon Wilkening of CRD’s Math Group have won prestigious career awards from the U.S. Air Force and the National Science Foundation, respectively. Persson, who is also an assistant professor in mathematics at UC Berkeley, was one of 38 researchers who submitted winning research proposals through the Air Force's Young Investigator Research Program. He will work on efficient and robust high-order methods for fluid and solid mechanics. Click here to read more about his research at. According to the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the is open to scientists and engineers at research institutions across the U.S who have received Ph.D. or equivalent degrees in the last five years and show exceptional ability and promise for conducting basic research.

Wilkening, who is also an assistant professor in mathematics at UC Berkeley, received an NSF Faculty Early Career Development Award (CAREER) to conduct research in optimization and continuation methods in fluid mechanics. As part of his five-year award, Wilkening also plans to host students in DOE’s Computational Science Graduate Fellowship program. He was a fellow in the program and completed his Ph.D. in math at UC Berkeley in 2002. Click here for more information about Wilkening’s work.

ESnet Expertise Tapped at the 2010 Interagency IPv6 Conference

As a pioneer in IPv6, the most fundamental protocol of the Internet, ESnet's Kevin Oberman was invited to give a presentation about how the facility uses and implements IPv6. Over 120 agencies were invited to attend the interagency conference sponsored by the Department of Veterans Affairs. Visit ESnet's Network Matters blog for Oberman's take on the IPv6 conference and all the latest news from the facility. More>

In the News:

Scientific Computing: Energy-Efficient HPC Is Heating Up

A new approach is needed to reach a set of common, useful metrics for energy efficiency in high-performance computing (HPC), says John Shalf, head of NERSC's Advanced Technologies Group, in an editorial for Scientific Computing. Shalf co-organized a Birds-of-a-Feather session at the recent 2010 International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg, Germany. “We need metrics that provide a better reflection of real-world use of these machines to run codes and applications,” he writes, stressing that the energy efficiency of the facility as a whole, including cooling, should not be overlooked. More>

International Science Grid This Week: Relativistic Reference Frames Speed Simulations

Even on a supercomputer, simulating the next generation of laser-plasma accelerators would take months. Luckily, by solving an old problem to create a new way to model these accelerators, an international group of researchers jointly led by Warren Mori at the University of California at Los Angeles and Luis Silva at the Instituto Superior Tecnico in Portugal, has cut the computation time by a factor of at least 100. Their laser-plasma simulation conducted on NERSC's Cray XT4 "Franklin" system was ISGTW's image of the week. More>

HPC Source: A Big Picture Approach to Scientific Data Storage

Increasingly sophisticated supercomputers and networks are changing the way science is done, whether allowing researchers to scrutinize the last 13 billion years of cosmic expansion or to better understand subatomic particles. Meanwhile, advancements in high-performance networks are facilitating remarkable levels of scientific collaborations. These trends are leading to unprecedented scientific productivity and forcing supercomputing centers to re-evaluate how they manage data, writes NERSC's Jason Hick in an editorial for HPC Source magazine. Hick heads the Storage Systems Group at NERSC. More>

New York Times: Web Photos That Reveal Secrets, Like Where You Live

A recent New York Times article quoted Robin Sommer of the Berkeley Lab's Advanced Computing for Science Department in CRD, about how geotags, which are embedded in photos and videos taken with GPS-equipped smartphones and digital cameras, can compromise privacy and safety of citizens who post this content online. The article was based on the paper "Cybercasing the Joint: On the Privacy Implications of Geotagging," which Sommer presented with his colleague Gerald Friedland at the Fifth USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Security (HotSec 10) in Washington, D.C. More>

To see where Berkeley Lab Computing Sciences stories have been mentioned in the news, click here.

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