Top Stories:

Sifting Through a Trillion Electrons

Using NERSC resources, astrophysicists generated a trillion-particle magnetic reconnection dataset in 3D, where each time-step of the simulation amounted to a massive 32 terabyte file. Armed with new tools developed by researchers in Berkeley Lab's Computational Research Division (CRD), the scientists were able to query this enormous dataset for particles of interest in three seconds, and visualize it. This is the first time a dataset of this magnitude has been queried and visualized this quickly. More>

Defining the Healthy Human Microbiome

The human microbiome's exact function, good and bad, is poorly understood. But that could all change now that the normal microbial make-up of healthy humans has been mapped for the first time. An NIH-organized consortium accomplished this work using software from Berkeley Lab’s CRD, supercomputers at NERSC, and networking resources from the Department of Energy's ESnet. More>

Physicsts Close in on a Rare-Particle Decay Process

With help from supercomputers at NERSC, the Enriched Xenon Observatory experiment (EXO-200) has placed the most stringent constraints yet on the nature of a process called neutrinoless double beta decay. In doing so, the physicists have narrowed down the range of possible masses for the neutrino—a tiny uncharged particle that rarely interacts with anything, passing right through people and planets at nearly the speed of light. More>

NewsBytes:

New to Berkeley Lab Computing Sciences

Introducing: Anuj Chaudhri and Douglas Jacobsen. More>

NERSC Signs Supercomputing Agreement With Cray

NERSC announced this month that Cray will install its next-generation supercomputer computing system. Consisting of products and services, the multi-year, multi-phase project is valued at more than $40 million. It includes delivery of a future-generation Cray supercomputer code-named "Cascade" and a next-generation Cray Sonexion storage system. When completed, the new system will deliver a peak performance of more than two-petaflops per second, equivalent to more than two-quadrillion calculations per second. The full system is expected to go into production in 2013. More>

Erich Strohmaier and the TOP500: A List That’s Taken on a Life of its Own

Erich Strohmaier presented the thirty-ninth edition of the TOP500 list during the opening session of the International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg, Germany. This profile tracks the beginning of the list and Strohmaier's career. More>

Berkeley Lab Staff Shared Expertise, Experiences at ISC'12

This month, an estimated 2,500 HPC experts from around the world convened in Hamburg, Germany for the 2102 International Supercomputing Conference (ISC'12). Among the presenters were six Berkeley Lab researchers. Now in its 27th year, ISC is the world's oldest and one of the most important conferences for the HPC community, offering a five-day technical program with a wide range of expert speakers and exhibits from leading research centers and vendors. More>

ESnet Celebrates World IPv6 Launch

On June 6, a new Internet began. The change was subtle, but a new address system is making the the web faster, and enabling us to do things that were not possible until now. The "thing" is a new ID system for the Internet, called IPv6. ESnet was one of the first government agencies to implement the new Internet protocol years ago, and the facility's engineers celebrated this year's Global IPv6 launch with television interviews, a number of informative blog posts, and a new dashboard that tracks the status of IPv6 deployment across its sites. More>

ESnet's Joe Burrescia and Jim Gagliardi Retire After Decades of Service

This month, Joe Burrescia retired as General Manager of ESnet after 32 years of Department of Energy service, and Jim Gagliardi retired as Computer Systems Engineer at ESnet after 33 years of service. Since they joined ESnet, both Burrescia and Gagliardi have seen the pace of the network speed up dramatically, from the then-blazing transfer rate of 1.5 megabits per second to today’s 100 gigabits per second.

In the News:

ABC7: More IP addresses added in Internet upgrade

In an interview with Richard Hart of KGO TV, ESnet network engineer Eli Dart discussed why Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) is important, what it means to businesses, and what will happen if companies lag in implementing it. More>

Ars Technica: Securing supercomputer networks (without disrupting 60Gbps data flows)

Thanks to networks like the US Department of Energy's ESnet, scientists crunching huge bodies of data finally have 10Gbps pipes at the ready to zap that information to their peers anywhere in the world. But oftentimes these blazing speeds are torpedoed by firewalls and other security devices. So using technology developed or funded by NERSC, ESnet, NSF and others, the University of Utah set out to architect a new security design, called "Science DMZ", that doesn't put a crimp on bandwidth. More>

WIRED Science Blog: A Random Walk with Pi

You know a mathematics paper is cool when it goes viral before it’s even been peer reviewed or published. That’s what happened last week when Samuel Arbesman, an applied mathematician and science blogger for Wired, posted “A Random Walk with Pi,” which discusses and presents images from the paper “Tools for visualizing real numbers: Planar number walks,” coauthored by David Bailey, head of the Complex Systems Group in the Computational Research Division, and Francisco J. Aragon Artacho and Jonathan Borwein of the CARMA Centre at the University of Newcastle in Australia, and Peter Borwein of Simon Fraser University in Canada. More>

HPCwire: LBNL Director of Scientific Networking to Lead ESnet

HPCwire announced Gregory Bell's appointment as the new director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Scientific Networking Division, and head of the U.S. Department of Energy's ESnet, or Energy Sciences Network. Bell, who has held both positions on an acting basis since November 2011, is the fourth person to lead ESnet since the organization was created in 1986. More>

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