Top Stories:

At Solar System's Edge, There Be ... Bubbles?

NASA's Voyager probes have reached the end of our solar system where they've found neither giants nor dragons, but something nearly as surprising—a turbulent froth of magnetic bubbles. Using new computer models to analyze Voyager data, scientists computing at NERSC have found that the sun's distant magnetic field is made up of bubbles about 100 million miles wide. The bubbles are created when magnetic field lines reorganize, a process known as magnetic reconnection. More>

ESnet Celebrates World IPv6 Day

On June 8, 2011, content providers, universities, ISPs, and other network organizations engaged in activities related to World IPv6 Day. This massive exercise was akin to a “test drive” where content was shared and networks were configured to support Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6), which is already supplanting the current Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4). As a network pioneer, ESnet has made most of its public content available over IPv6 for several years. However, ESnet still took a number of actions to further engage the community on World IPv6 Day; read more. ESnet network engineer Michael Sinatra answers questions about IPv6 on the DOE Energy Blog.

NewsBytes:

New to Berkeley Lab Computing Sciences

Introducing: Xuefei (Rebecca) Yuan and Aaron Thomas. More>

Hopper Among World's Top 10 Fastest Computers

There are only 10 computers in the world with petaflops power—capable of calculating quadrillions of calculations in one second. According to the 37th edition of the Top500 List, NERSC’s Cray XE6 “Hopper” system is one of them. All of the systems on the TOP500 List are ranked on how fast they run Linpack, a benchmark application developed to solve a dense system of linear equations. With a Linpack benchmark performance of 1.054 petaflops, Hopper ranks No. 8 among the most powerful systems in the world. The system has a theoretical peak performance of 1.29 petaflops. More>

Jamie Sethian Is Named Einstein Visiting Fellow in Berlin

Jamie Sethian, Professor of Mathematics at UC Berkeley and head of Berkeley Lab’s Mathematics Group, is one of two mathematicians recently named Einstein Visiting Fellow to the Berlin Mathematical School. An Einstein Visiting Fellow is not a conventional visiting scientist who attends a university or research institution in Berlin for just one semester. The fellows, funded by the Einstein Foundation Berlin, are asked to become long-term partners with the science and research community in Berlin.

Kevin Oberman Engineered Engaging Career at ESnet

Kevin Oberman's career path has been marked by surprising events trumping his expectations and plans, leading to a 37-year career in networking and engineering first at Lawrence Livermore and then at Berkeley Lab as a senior network engineer with ESnet. More>

Berkeley Lab Staff Add HPC Expertise to ISC'11

Each June, the global HPC community convenes in Germany for the International Supercomputing Conference, now the world's second largest HPC meeting. And each year, Berkeley Lab staff add their expertise to the international lineup of speakers. ISC'11 was held June 19-23 at the Congress Center Hamburg. Here is a list of Berkeley Lab participants.

Awards:

NERSC Honored for HPC Innovations Excellence

The Department of Energy’s NERSC has been honored with an HPC Innovation Excellence Award for providing supercomputing, storage, and service support to the 20th Century Reanalysis Project—a collaboration of the University of Colorado, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Atmospheric Circulation Reconstructions over the Earth Initiative, and 30 international organizations. Led by University of Colorado climatologists Gilbert Compo and Prashant Sardeshmukh and NOAA meteorologist Jeffrey Whitaker, the project uses supercomputers to reconstruct global historical weather maps from 1871 to the present day.  This dataset helps the science community put current weather extremes in a historical perspective, determine how extremes are changing, and validate computer climate models. More>

David Leinweber Named One of Top 10 Innovators of Decade in Trading Industry

David Leinweber of the Computational Research Division has been named by Advanced Trading magazine as one of its "Top 10 Innovators of the Decade" for his work in developing a service that allows trading strategies to react to news the instant it breaks, managing what the magazine describes as "a fire hose of aggregated updates." Last year, Leinweber joined Berkeley Lab from UC Berkeley and established the Center for Innovative Financial Technology (CIFT) to help build a bridge between the computational science and financial markets communities. Leinweber, who has a Ph.D. in applied mathematics from Harvard University, may be best known as the author of Nerds on Wall Street: Math Machines and Wired Markets, published in 2009. More>

ESnet's OSCARS Honored in UC Larry L. Sautter Award Program

The University of California Information Technology Leadership Council has announced that ESnet’s On-Demand Secure Circuits and Reservation System (OSCARS) was selected for honorable mention in the 2011 Larry L. Sautter Award Program. The Sautter Award was established in 2000 to encourage and recognize innovative deployment of information technology in support of the University’s mission. The Sauter Award honors projects developed by faculty and staff in any department at the ten UC campuses, the UC Office of the President (UCOP), and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The awards will be presented at the UC Computing Services Conference at UC Merced, August 8, 2011.

ICCS Members Collaborate on Award-Winning Paper

One year after Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and UC Berkeley established the International Center for Computational Science with partners at the University of Heidelberg in Germany and the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in China, the first research paper submitted by ICCS-affiliated researchers will be honored with the PRACE Award. The award, sponsored by the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE), was presented to the authors at the 2011 International Supercomputing Conference. More>

In the News:

The Economist: Parallel Bars

Parallel programming, once an obscure niche, is the focus of increasing interest as multicore chips proliferate in ordinary PCs, according to the article “Parallel bars” in the June 2 issue of The Economist. NERSC Division Director Kathy Yelick and UC Berkeley professor David Patterson, who has a joint appointment in the Computational Research Division, are two of the experts quoted in the article, which discusses both the necessity and the difficulties of parallel programming. More>

KQED QUEST: Supercomputers Hit an Energy Wall

Whether it's laptops or cell phones, computers are getting smaller for most of us. But for many scientists, they're getting larger. Supercomputers have become a critical tool for analyzing complex problems like climate change. But as supercomputers grow, so does their energy appetite. John Shalf and Kathy Yelick talk about how Berkeley Lab researchers are trying to solve that problem by using a smaller, more pervasive technology. More>

HPCWire: Heterogeneous Computing and HPC Accelerators, Disruptive Technologies in the Making

The HPC community has known for awhile that conventional CPUs, at least in their x86 form, will not be a practical path to exascale computing. Two of the biggest emerging solutions are heterogeneous architectures and GPU/accelerator computing. But is the emerging HPC heterogeneous architecture with discrete GPUs or Intel MIC co-processors just another dead end as well? NERSC's John Shalf lends his expertise. More>

ISGTW: The Case of the Missing Proton Spin

STAR researchers explore the feasibility of creating a real-time cloud-based data processing system on the Magellan testbed at NERSC and the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility. More>

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

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