Top Stories:

Supercomputers Take a Cue from
Microwave Ovens

As sophisticated as modern climate models are, one critical component continues to elude their precision—clouds. To build the breakthrough supercomputers that climate researchers need to model clouds, scientists are taking a cue from consumer electronics where everything from chips to batteries to software is optimized to the device’s application. More>

Today’s Severe Drought, Tomorrow’s Normal

While the worst drought since the Dust Bowl of the 1930s grips Oklahoma and Texas, scientists are warning that what we consider severe drought conditions in North America today may be normal for the continent by the mid-21st century, due to a warming planet. More>

Catching Extreme Weather Events in Climate Models

Berkeley researchers are using state-of-the-art methods in data mining and high-performance computing to quantify extreme weather phenomena in the very large datasets generated by today’s climate models. This work will help scientists predict how climate change impacts the frequency of extreme weather events. More>

Closest-Ever Look at the Explosion of a Type Ia Supernova

Even as the "supernova of a generation" came into view in backyards across the northern hemisphere last August, physicists and astronomers who had caught its earliest moments were developing a surprising and much clearer picture of what happens during a titanic Type Ia explosion. Now they have announced the closest, most detailed look ever at one of the universe’s brightest “standard candles,” the celestial mileposts that led to the discovery of dark energy. More>

Co-Designing Exascale Architectures and Algorithms for Real-World Combustion Simulations

In a five-year project recently announced by the Department of Energy, the Combustion Exascale Co-Design Center will combine the talents of combustion scientists, mathematicians, computer scientists, and hardware architects. This multidisciplinary team will work to simultaneously redesign each aspect of the combustion simulation process—from algorithms to programming models to hardware architecture—in order to create high fidelity combustion simulations that can run at the next level of supercomputing power, the exascale. More>

NewsBytes:

New to Berkeley Lab Computing Sciences

Introducing: Daithi Stone and Jack Deslippe. More>

NERSC's Steve Lowe: Driven to High Performance Machines

During his combined 29 years at Lawrence Livermore and Lawrence Berkeley national labs, Steve Lowe has worked with some of the most powerful computing machinery anywhere. But come Jan. 3, he'll trade in his career and home in Tracy for a new lifestyle—retiring and spending a few years exploring North America with his wife in an RV. More>

Berkeley Lab Reaches Out to Women in Computing

Although women comprise the majority of the United States labor force, 60 percent of college graduates in developed countries, most of the of Internet users, and start the majority of new companies created each year in the US, they have made surprisingly few inroads into high performance computing, according to a recent editorial in HPCWire. Berkeley Lab is working to increase the number of women in computer science and HPC applying to work at the Lab.

Last month, Berkeley Lab Computing Sciences staff reached out to this group at the Grace Hopper Celebration in Portland, Ore. Back in California, Katie Antypas, who heads NERSC's User Services Group, gave students from Mills College, historically a college for women, a lesson in parallel computing and a tour of the facility's supercomputers. This group also included a co-ed contingent from Mills College's graduate program. More>

A Look Back at SC11

In November 2011, thousands of experts in computing and networking flocked to Seattle, Washington, for SC11—the leading international conference for high-performance computing. This year, Berkeley Lab staff gave an awe-inspiring demonstration of 100 Gigabits per second network capacity and were honored with a number of awards. Here are some highlights from the conference. More>

In the News:

New York Times: Computer Scientists May Have What It Takes to Help Cure Cancer

David Patterson, a professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley with a joint appointment in the Computational Research Division, wrote a column in the Dec. 5 edition of the New York Times outlining how thousands of people, volunteering their personal computers, could speed the task of sequencing the genome of a tumor. Patterson suggests this approach in light of the recent discovering that cancer is a genetic disease, caused primarily by mutations in our DNA. As well as providing the molecular drivers of cancer, changes to the DNA also cause the diversity within a cancer tumor that makes it so hard to eradicate completely. More>

Space.com: Cosmic Autopsy Reveals Youngest Supernova's Origins

Scientists studying the youngest type of Ia supernova ever found worked backward to pinpoint its explosion time with unparalleled accuracy. In doing so, they confirmed that a white dwarf was the source of the blast, and gleaned insights into the nature of the dwarf's companion star. More>

Danger of Death: Are We Programmed to Miscalculate Risk?

Assessing risk is something everyone must do every day. Yet few are very good at it. In this editorial, Berkeley Lab's Chief Technologist David Bailey and University of Newcastle mathematics professor Jon Borwein discuss the significant consequences of the public’s collective inability to accurately assess risk. More>

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