Top Stories:

A Massive Burst, Before the Supernova

An automated supernova hunt is shedding new light on the death sequence of massive stars—specifically, the kind that self-destruct in Type IIn supernova explosions. Digging through the Palomar Transient Factory data archive housed at NERSC, astronomers have found the first causal evidence that these massive stars shed huge amounts of material in a "penultimate outburst" before final detonation as supernovae. More>

NGF Played a Key Role in Discovery of the Last Neutrino Mixing Angle

Discovery of the last neutrino mixing angle was announced in March 2012, just a few months after the Daya Bay Neutrino Experiment’s first detectors went online in southeast China. But that result might not have been available so quickly without the NERSC Global Filesystem (NGF) infrastructure. More>

NewsBytes:

NERSC Announces Winners of HPC Achievement Awards

NERSC announced the winners of their inaugural High Performance Computing (HPC) Achievement Awards at the annual NERSC User Group meeting at Berkeley Lab. The awardees are all NERSC users who have either demonstrated an innovative use of HPC resources to solve a scientific problem, or whose work has had an exceptional impact on scientific understanding or society. More>

John Shalf Speaks at HPC Advisory Council

NERSC Chief Technology Officer John Shalf spoke on "Energy Efficiency and Its Impact on Requirements for Future Programming Environments" at the HPC Advisory Council Stanford Conference on February 7–8, 2013. The conference focused on HPC usage models and benefits, the future of supercomputing, latest technology developments, best practices, and advanced HPC topics. More>

ESnet Contributes Ideas on Energy-Efficient Networking

Since he joined ESnet in 2009, Inder Monga has been advocating approaches to assess and improve the energy efficiency of the national network. So, when 27 of the world’s leading thinkers in energy-efficient networking gathered February 7–8 in Santa Barbara, it wasn’t surprising that ESnet's Chief Technologist Monga was among those invited to share their ideas. More>

Computing Sciences Researchers Among the Founding Editors of New ACM Journal

Kathy Yelick, Associate Lab Director for Computing Sciences, and Aydin Buluç, a member of the Complex Systems Group in CRD, are among the founding associate editors of a new journal: ACM Transactions on Parallel Computing (TOPC). TOPC will focus on novel and innovative work on all aspects of parallel computing, including foundational and theoretical aspects, systems, languages, architectures, tools and applications. Submissions are now being accepted for the journal.

CS Staff Contribute to SIAM Conference on Computational Science and Engineering

The annual SIAM Conference on Computational Science and Engineering was held February 25–March 1, in Boston, MA. The SIAM CS&E conference seeks to enable in-depth technical discussions on a wide variety of major computational efforts on large problems in science and engineering, foster the interdisciplinary culture required to meet these large-scale challenges, and promote the training of the next generation of computational scientists. Contributions to the conference from Berkeley Lab Computing Sciences researchers are listed here.

Berkeley Lab Staff Shared Strategies, Expertise at 100G and Beyond Workshop

ESnet, along with Calit2 (the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology) and CENIC (the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California), convened the 100G and Beyond Workshop, to examine the ways in which 100-gigbabit-per-second networking will impact applications in many areas, including science, health care, and media arts applications; campus and lab strategies; smart manufacturing; network innovation; and regional, national, and international testbeds. ESnet rolled out its 100 Gbps network last November — the first national 100 Gbps science network in the world. More>

Video: ESnet Staff Describe How They Contributed to the World's First SDN Transport

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is an emerging field that makes it easier for software applications to automatically configure and control the various layers of the network. In November 2012, ESnet joined Infinera to demo a prototype SDN Open Transport Switch (OTS), the first capable of dynamically controlling bandwidth services at the optical layer. In this video, ESnet's Chief Technologist Inder Monga and Network Engineer Chin Guok talk about how they worked with Infinera to reach this milestone. (Monga appears around the one-minute mark). More>

Outreach:

NERSC Staff Participate in Regional Science Bowl

High school students from all corners of the San Francisco Bay Area flocked to Berkeley Lab on February 2, 2013 to battle in the DOE’s Regional Science Bowl—an academic competition that tests students’ knowledge in all areas of science. A number of NERSC staff participated in Saturday’s event as moderators, scientific judges, timekeepers and scorekeepers. More>

Berkeley Lab Contributes to 2013 Tapia Computing Conference

The 2013 Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing Conference was the most successful in the 12-year history of the conference, with Berkeley Lab Computing Sciences making key contributions. Held Feb. 7-10 in Washington, D.C., the 2013 conference drew a record 550 participants, 60 percent of whom were students. More>

In the News:

DOE CSGF Fellow Makes Top 30 List in Forbes

Leslie Dewan, a DOE Computational Science Graduate Fellow who spent the summer of 2011 working in CRD's Center for Computational Science and Engineering, has been named to Forbes magazine’s "30 Under 30: Energy" list of the “the field’s brightest stars under the age of 30.” Dewan, currently a PhD student at MIT, is also the co-founder and CEO of Transatomic Power, a new company that aims to “turn nuclear waste into a safe, clean and scalable source of electricity.” See the Forbes profile, Forbes interview, and TED talk.

Economist: The Future of Energy: Batteries Included?

Modern life would be impossible without batteries, but many engineers find them disappointing and feel that they could be better still. Produce the right battery at the right price, these engineers think, and you could make the internal-combustion engine redundant and usher in a world in which free fuel, in the form of wind and solar energy, is the norm. That really would be a revolution. It is, however, a revolution that people have been awaiting a long time. And the longer they wait, the more the doubters wonder if it will ever happen. The DOE’s Joint Centre for Energy Storage Research (JCESR), which includes Berkeley Lab collaborators, hopes to prove the doubters wrong. Their research makes use of a rapidly growing encyclopedia of substances created by the Materials Project, which computes at NERSC. More>

Find out where Berkeley Lab Computing Sciences stories have been mentioned in the news.

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