December 2009
 |
A new book, Scientific Data Management: Challenges, Technology, and Deployment, edited by the Berkeley Lab's Arie Shoshani and Doron Rotem, provides a comprehensive understanding of the challenges of managing data during scientific exploration processes, from data generation to analysis. The book is a volume in the Chapman & Hall/CRC Computational Science Series, which is edited by Horst Simon, also of Berkeley Lab.
Read more about this book in an article from ISGTW.
 |
 |
 |
Juan Meza of the Computational Research Division is one of five researchers from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory elected as Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Meza was cited "for exemplary service to the federal energy laboratories and professional societies in enhancing research and research participation." More>
 |
Researchers have found that electrical resistance through a molecular junction can be turned ‘on’ and ‘off’ by simply pushing and pulling the junction. Experts believe that this molecular-scale control could be leveraged for future nanoscale electronic devices. The work was achieved with an allocation on NERSC's Cray XT4 system, Franklin. More>
 |
An extraordinarily bright, long-lasting supernova named SN 2007bi turns out to be the first example of the kind of stars that initially populated the Universe. The event was recorded on images taken by the Palomar-QUEST Survey, and detected and categorized as unusual by CRD researchers using NERSC's Cray XT4 system, Franklin. More>
Manycore processors and accelerators such as GPUs and FPGAs could be the next big revolution in high performance computing (HPC), providing much more computing power and energy efficiency. This month, a group of astronomers, physicists and HPC experts gathered at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory to discuss how GPUs and FPGAs are meeting their unique needs. The workshop was co-organized by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, NERSC, SLAC and Stanford’s Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology. More>
Introducing: Jeff Johnson, Angel Castro and Mehmet Balman. More>
SuperLU, a general purpose library for the direct solution of large, sparse, non-symmetric systems of linear equations on high performance machines, has hit a new record for downloads. Based on counts of various software between Oct. 1, 2008 and Oct. 31, 2009, SuperLU had 9,983 downloads. Among these downloads, 5,719 were for sequential SuperLU, 2,485 for SuperLU DIST and 1,779 for SuperLU MT.
According to developer Sherry Li, of CRD's Scientific Computing Group, SuperLU_MT (shared-memory multithreaded) has relatively more downloads compared to previous years, because multicore systems are widely used now. SuperLU was developed by Li, Jim Demmel of UC Berkeley and CRD, John Gilbert of UC Santa Barbara, Laura Grigori of INRIA in France, and Meiyue Shao of Umea University in Sweden. For more information about SuperLU, click here.
The Berkeley Lab's Horst Simon was one of five prominent individuals from the HPC scene to receive the honor of ISC Fellow in the spirit of international cooperation, exchange of ideas and in recognition of their dedication and belief in the need for the yearly International Supercomputing Conference and Exhibition. The award ceremony took place in November at SC09 in Portland, Oregon. More>
NERSC users Wim Leemans, of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and William Dorland, of the University of Maryland, were 2009 recipients of the U.S. Department of Energy’s highest honor, the E. O. Lawrence Award, for their outstanding contributions in research and development supporting the DOE and its missions. Click here for the DOE award annoucment.
Click here to read a SciDAC Review article about how Leeman and his collaborators exploit massively parallel particle simulations developed under SciDAC to provide physical insight into the development of next-generation accelerators that use laser-driven plasma waves.
Click here to read a SciDAC Review article about how Dorland and his collaborators are employing scientific computing to explore methods for controlling the fusion reaction to produce power more cleanly and efficiently.
For more issues of Computing Sciences News, please click here.
To receive e-mail updates from the Berkeley Lab Computing Sciences Communications Team, please subscribe to the RSS feed on our homepage or contact Linda Vu at lvu@lbl.gov.
To see where Berkeley Lab Computing Sciences stories have been mentioned in the news, click here.