Top Stories:

Berkeley Lab Receives $4 Million to Develop Computational Methods for Energy Research

Researchers in the Computational Research Division (CRD) of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have received more than $4 million in funding for six projects that will help develop computational methods to answer some of the nation's most pressing questions regarding energy efficiency, climate stabilization, and next-generation, carbon-neutral energy sources. More>

Science at Scale: SciDAC Astrophysics Code Scales to Over 200K Processors

Performing high-resolution, high-fidelity, three-dimensional simulations of Type Ia supernovae requires not only algorithms that accurately represent the correct physics, but also codes that effectively harness the resources of the next generation supercomputers. The Berkeley Lab's Center for Computational Sciences and Engineering (CCSE) has developed two codes that can do just that. More>

Computers Give Insights into Generating Power Like the Sun

Although magnetic fusion has been achieved on Earth, researchers still do not understand the behavior of plasma well enough to effectively confine it to generate a sustainable flow of energy. That's where the supercomputers at NERSC come in. More>

Grace Hopper Powers Science on NERSC's New Cray XE6

American computer scientist Grace Hopper will power science on the cabinets of the NERSC's petascale Cray XE6 system. A pioneer in the field of software development and programming languages, Hopper created the first compiler and was a champion for increasing the usability of computers. NERSC's new flagship machine is named "Hopper" in her honor. More>

NERSC and HDF Group Optimize HDF5 Library to Improve I/O Performance

There are several layers of software that deal with I/O on high performance computing (HPC) systems. Getting these three layers of software to work together efficiently can have a big impact on a scientific code's performance. That's why the U.S. Department of Energy's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) has partnered with the nonprofit Hierarchical Data Format (HDF) Group to optimize the performance of the HDF5 library on modern HPC platforms. More>

NewsBytes:

New to Berkeley Lab Computing Sciences

Introducing: Edward "Eddie" Baron, Brian Austin and Bradley Froehle. More>

Berkeley Lab Plays a Key Role in the Human Microbiome Project

Berkeley Lab's Victor Markowitz and Nikos Kyrpides lead the Data Acquisition and Coordination Center for the Human Microbiome Project. The HMP is a multi-institutional effort to gain a better understanding of the community of microbes that outnumber the human cells in our bodies by a 10:1 ratio and are critical to our health and physical well being. More>

ESnet Launches “Network Matters” Blog

ESnet has started a new blog called "Network Matters." The blog will keep the DOE community informed about ESnet projects in progress and the science ESnet makes possible. Recent topics include a new staff member, progress towards the 100G prototype network, and data distribution for the Large Hadron Collider. More>

Video Blog Chronicles ISC Conference in Germany

John Shalf, head of NERSC's Advanced Technologies Group, was one of two video bloggers offering views on developments from the International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg, Germany earlier this month. Co-blogging with Shalf was Heike Jagode, a computer scientist at the University of Tennessee. More>

Berkeley Lab Team Wins Best Paper Award at Cloud Computing Conference

A team of researchers from Berkeley Lab has received the Best Paper Award at ScienceCloud 2010, the 1st Workshop on Scientific Cloud Computing sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery. The paper, “Seeking Supernovae in the Clouds: A Performance Study,” was written by Keith Jackson and Lavanya Ramakrishnan of the Advanced Computing for Science Department (ACS), Karl Runge of the Physics Division and Rollin Thomas of the Computational Cosmology Center (C3). More>

Register Now for Virtual Summer School in Computing

The newly established International Center for Computational Science will present a five-day course to teach how to use multicore devices for scientific computing, scale parallel code to tens of thousands of CPU cores, and more. There is no charge for the Aug. 2 - 6 program at NERSC, but registration is limited. More>

Peter Ungaro Outlines Future Directions in Talk at NERSC

As part of his June 10 visit to Berkeley Lab and NERSC, Pete Ungaro, the Chief Executive Officer of Cray Inc., gave a candid assessment of the company's current role in the high performance computing (HPC) market and described the company's next-generation supercomputer architecture. More>

Outreach:

PHOTO STORY: Oakland Tech Students Tour NERSC Machine Room, Get Souvenirs

As part of the Berkeley Lab's new outreach initiative, NERSC has started a partnership with Oakland Technical High School's Computer Science and Technology Academy, a small academy within the larger high school. On Thursday afternoon, June 3, 12 students from Oakland Tech and their teacher, Emmanuel Onyeador, visited the Oakland Scientific Facility for an introduction to computational science and supercomputer architecture, and a tour of the NERSC machine room. More>

How a Summer Internship—or a Weekend Lecture—Can Change a Life

Larry Pezzaglia turned two summer internships in the Berkeley Lab's Computational Research Division (CRD) into a career as a system administrator in (CRD). More>

For more issues of Computing Sciences News, please click here. To receive weekly updates from the Berkeley Lab Computing Sciences Communications team, follow us on Facebook and Twitter. To subscribe to the monthly Berekeley Lab Computing Sciences Newsletter, please contact Linda Vu at lvu@lbl.gov

To see where Berkeley Lab Computing Sciences stories have been mentioned in the news, click here.