Top Stories:

Northern California National Laboratories Are the First U.S. Stops for LHC’s ALICE Data

One month a year, the nuclei of lead atoms traveling near the speed of light will collide in the Large Hadron Collider’s (LHC) ALICE experiment. Ten percent of all of the data collected in this month will travel from Switzerland to NERSC at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Northern California via the Energy Sciences Network (ESnet). These facilities will provide the primary computing and storage resources for the ALICE collaboration in North and South America. More>

Berkeley Lab Contributes Expertise to New Amazon Web Services Offering

This month Amazon Web Services (AWS) lauched a new Cluster Compute Instances offering for Amazon EC2, which will make high-bandwidth, low-latency HPC resources available in a cloud-computing environment. To ensure that this new service can handle a gamut of demanding HPC applications, AWS staff worked closely with researchers in the Berkeley Lab's Computational Research Division (CRD), Information Technologies Division, and NERSC. More>

Computer Simulations Show That "Sweaty" Flowers Cool the World

The world is a cooler, wetter place because of transpiring flowers, say University of Chicago researchers who ran more than a million lines of code on the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center's (NERSC's) IBM Power5 "Bassi" system last year. They found that this effect is especially pronounced in the Amazon basin, where 80 percent of ever-wet rainforest area would not exist without flowering plants. These findings were published online on June 16, 2010 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. More>

For Platinum Catalysts, Smaller May Be Better

When it comes to metal catalysts, the platinum standard is, well, platinum. However, at about $2,000 an ounce, platinum is more expensive than gold. The high cost of the raw material presents major challenges for the future wide scale use of platinum in fuel cells. With a little help from CRD's Lin-Wang Wang, a Berkeley Lab study showed that under high pressure, nanoparticle clusters of platinum potentially can out-perform the single crystals of platinum now used in fuel cells and catalytic converters. More>

Researchers Explore Exascale Computing for Energy Security

How will the United States satisfy energy demand in a tightening global energy marketplace while, at the same time, reducing greenhouse gas emissions? Exascale computing — expected to be available within the next eight to ten years —may play a crucial role in answering that question by enabling a paradigm shift from test-based to science-based design and engineering. More>

NewsBytes:

New to Berkeley Lab Computing Sciences

Introducing: Kaushik Balakrishnan, Jennifer Horsman, Manoj Pillay, David Camp, Jim Mellander, Matthew "Cody" Rotermund and Chang-Seo Park. More>

PHOTOSTORY: The Next Generation of Computer Scientists

As part of the Berkeley Lab's commitment to mentor the next generation of scientists, the Computing Sciences Directorate hosted 14 local high school students as part of an outreach program to introduce students to various career options in scientific computing and networking. The sessions include presentations, hands-on activities, and tours of facilities. The program was developed with input from computer science teachers at Berkeley High, Albany High, Richmond's Kennedy High, and Oakland Tech. More>

NERSC User William H. Miller Honored With Ahmed Zewail Prize

NERSC user William Miller of the Berkeley Lab's Chemical Sciences Division has won the 2010 Ahmed Zewail Prize in Molecular Sciences. Miller was recognized for his contributions to the theory of chemical reactions. His research has dealt with all aspects of molecular collision theory and chemical reaction dynamics. Most recently his efforts have focused on developing a practical way of adding quantum effects to classical molecular dynamics simulations of chemical processes.

"NERSC has been an enormous asset to my research. The Department of Energy has been very generous in allocating these resources to us, and my team utilizes these resources as much as we can. The center’s high performance computer offerings makes it possible for us to try out a lot of things that we wouldn’t otherwise be able to do," says Miller. More>

NERSC User Inez Fung Joins Academia Sinica

NERSC user Inez Fung of Berkeley Lab’s Earth Sciences Division has been elected as an academician to Taiwan’s Academia Sinica. Fung conducts research on atmospheric science, climate change, and the global carbon cycle. Academia Sinica was founded in 1928 to promote and undertake scholarly research in sciences and humanities. More>

FLUXNET Provides Insights into the Global Carbon Cycle

Environmental researchers around the globe can share and analyze FLUXNET field data through an online collaboration portal called fluxdata.org, which was developed with the Berkeley Water Center by a team of researchers and computer scientists from the Berkeley Lab’s ACS Department, University of California at Berkeley, Microsoft Research and the University of Virginia. FLUXNET allows researchers from around the globe to coordinate regional observations from micrometeorological tower sites that measure the exchanges of CO2, water vapor, and energy between terrestrial ecosystems and the atmosphere. They began building the portal three years ago, and this month two research teams that have reaped the benefits of this architecture published their findings in the journal Science. The papers are: "Terrestrial Gross Carbon Dioxide Uptake: Global Distribution and Co-variation with Climate" and " Global Convergence in the Temperature Sensitivity of Respiration at Ecosystem Level."

Planck Mission Delivers First All-Sky Image

"An extraordinary treasure chest of new data for astronomers, from the closest portions of the Milky Way to the furthest reaches of space and time," says the European Space Agency of the Planck mission’s first all-sky image.

The satellite was launched in May 2009 and has been surveying the sky since August 2009. NERSC hosts the U.S. Planck team’s data analysis through the Computational Cosmology Center, a collaboration of the Computational Research and Physics Divisions. Read more about Planck and Berkeley Lab at: Berkeley Lab Team Receives NASA Public Service Group Achievement Award, NERSC Continues Tradition of CMB Analysis with the Planck Cluster, Planck Mission Has Roots and Branches in Berkeley. More>

In the News:

NERSC's John Shalf Talks Parallel Programming Languages with ISGTW

Ever wonder what parallel programming is and how it can advance science? John Shalf, the team lead of the Advanced Technologies Group at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, discusses the scientific need for parallel programming and its future in a Q&A conducted by International Science Grid This Week. Among many topics covered, Shalf explains the difference between parallel programming languages and programming languages, as well as emerging trends in computing. More>

CRD's David Patterson Writes About The Trouble with Multicore

In this essay for the IEEE Spectrum, UC Berkeley professor and CRD researcher David Patterson gives an easy-to-read overview of the many ways researchers, including his Par Lab team, are trying to respond to the multicore problem, and he assesses their chance of success. His forecast is cautiously optimistic. More>

CRD's Robin Sommer Writes About "Cybercasing"

The photos and videos you upload could reveal a lot about where you are. Data stored in digital photographs can help criminals locate individuals and plot real-world crimes, a practice two researchers — including Robin Sommer of Berkeley Lab’s Computational Research Division — called "cybercasing" in a recently published paper. More>

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