Top Stories:

A Goldilocks Catalyst

Carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions from fossil fuel combustion are major contributors to global warming. Since this greenhouse gas comes from burning fuel, researchers believe that it can be converted back into fuel rather than released into the atmosphere. Catalysts that induce chemical reactions could be the key to this recycling process. Now a team of researchers are using NERSC computers to find the right one for the job. More>

ESnet Upgrades Network Performance Knowledge Base

ESnet’s performance knowledge base, fasterdata.es.net, has been updated and reorganized. This site contains over 85 pages of information and advice, and gets over 3000 hits per week from all over the world. It is used by folks in all industries and R&E to improve their network performance and troubleshoot problems. More>

NewsBytes:

New to Berkeley Lab Computing Sciences

Introducing: Michael Sinatra, Ravinderjeet "Ravi" Cheema, Gopal Vaswani and Jeffery Grounds. More>

Two Berkeley Lab Researchers Named 2011 Sloan Fellows

Per-Olof Persson and Koushik Sen from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Mathematics and Future Technologies Group have been awarded the prestigious Sloan Research Fellowship, given annually by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to scientists, mathematicians and economists who are at an early stage of their research careers. The awardees will receive a $50,000 grant over the next two years to pursue any line of research they choose. More>

Kennedy High School Students Visit NERSC

Eighteen students from Kennedy High School’s TechFutures Academy in Richmond paid a visit to NERSC on February 9. In addition to a brief introduction to supercomputers from NERSC’s User Services Group Lead, Katie Antypas, the students also got a lesson about how “Careers in Computer Science Save the World” from Associate Lab Director of Computing Sciences Kathy Yelick. One of the highlights of the visit was a tour of the facility’s computer room. More>

NERSC Users Elected to National Academy of Engineering

Among the 68 new members and nine foreign associates elected to the National Academy of Engineering, announced in Washington this month, are long-time NERSC users Karsten Pruess of Berkeley Lab’s Earth Sciences Division (ESD) and Ramamoorthy Ramesh of the Materials Sciences Division (MSD). Election to the National Academy of Engineering is among the highest professional distinctions accorded to an engineer. More>

Berkeley Lab Hosts Successful Workshop on Manycore- and Accelerator-based HPC

The second annual workshop on "Manycore and Accelerator-based High-performance Scientific Computing" held Jan. 24-28 in Berkeley drew nearly 100 attendees and a new international partner. The meeting focused on harnessing the full potential of emerging many-core architectures in science and technology by bringing together experts and enthusiasts from academia and industry to introduce, explore and discuss the scope and challenges of these novel architectures for high performance computing. The developed solutions will have broader impact across science and technology disciplines such as healthcare, energy, aerospace and others. More>

In the News:

HPC Wire: Carbon Sequestration Gets Supercomputing Boost

There are lots of ways to capture and store carbon: stimulating uptake by plants via photosynthesis, creating a soil conditioner known as biochar, creating inert carbonates by reacting the CO₂ with the appropriate minerals, and storing CO₂ in the ground. They each have their own advantages and disadvantages, but they all share a common unknown: How will this man-made carbon cycling effect the environment? This is where big-time computer modeling comes in. More>

The East African: US scientists predict prolonged drought as Indian Ocean warms up

CRD's Michael Wehner, who is also an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) member, concurs with a new finding from UC Berkeley researchers that East Africa will receive less rainfall in years to come due to effects of climate change. More>

CNN Money: Why we still can't prevent flash crashes

Although regulators have put small changes in place in the U.S. markets since last May's flash crash, our hyper-wired interconnected markets still aren't equipped to prevent another one, writes David Leinweber of CRD's Center for Innovative Financial Technolog (CIFT). CIFT was created to help the nation's most advanced computational researchers improve understanding of financial markets. More>

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