Top Stories:

NERSC Helps Shed Light on the Nature of Antimatter

Using the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center’s (NERSC) Parallel Distributed Systems Facility (PDSF) and the Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), physicists have detected and confirmed the first-ever antimatter hypernucleus, called “antihypertriton.” More>

Baby Brutes: Simulations Help Solve the Mysteries of Massive Young Star-Forming Galaxies

Astronomers have in recent years been surprised to find hulking brutes among the baby galaxies of the early Universe. Once considered oddities, these galaxies are now thought to be the engines that drove the Universe's most active period of star formation. Using NERSC's supercomputers, astronomers are successfully simulating these massive galaxies to understand how they came to be so quickly and what has happened to them in our modern Universe. More>

Measuring a Monstrous Supernova

The international Nearby Supernova Factory (SNfactory) based at Berkeley Lab has measured, for the first time, the mass of a kind of Type Ia supernova astronomers once thought would be so exceedingly rare they might never be found. Richard Scalzo of Yale University, leading a team of his SNfactory colleagues (including Peter Nugent and Rollin Thomas of CRD’s Computational Cosmology Center), found that the progenitor star (or stars) of the extra-bright supernova 2007if had almost two and a half times the mass of our sun — a so-called super-Chandrasekhar-mass supernova. More>

ESnet Collaborates with SURFnet and NORDUnet to Create Network Research Framework

As the pace of global collaborations increases, scientists need to reliably exchange massive datasets between research centers. That's why ESnet is working with SURFnet and NORDUnet to explore common methodologies for reserving end-to-end bandwidth to accelerate such data transfers. This capability is essential to provide the high speed connectivity that can support exascale science. More>

NewsBytes:

NISE to Award 29 Million Computing Hours at NERSC in 2010

For the 2010 allocation year about 29 million hours of computing time is being made available to existing or new NERSC projects under NERSC's Initiative for Scientific Exploration (NISE, pronounced “nice”). This time is set aside for groups exploring new scientific research areas, programming models, or algorithms. More>

Exploring Cloud Computing for DOE’s Scientific Mission

Cloud computing is gaining traction in the commercial world, with companies offering pay-to-play cycles to help organizations meet cyclical demands for extra computing power. But can such an approach also meet the computing and data storage demands of the nation’s scientific community? A new ARRA program funded through the Department of Energy will examine cloud computing as a cost-effective and energy-efficient computing paradigm for mid-range science users at NERSC and the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility. More>

The Evolving Ecosystem for Parallel Software

Academic and commercial communities have long sought a language that could hide the complexity of parallel machines while providing high performance across machine scales. This would lower the barrier to entry for parallel computing, make parallel machines more attractive as commercial products, and create a strong workforce for high-end scientific programming. Developed by a collaboration of researchers at UC Berkeley, Berkeley Lab's CRD and NERSC, Unified Parallel Code (UPC) is currently the most promising language solution for tackling the complexities of parallel computing. More>

The Role of Exascale Computing in 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 may play a crucial role in answering that question. More>

Exascale Supercomputing Advances Climate Research

DOE Office of Science leadership computing systems have gone from 7 teraflop/s at the NERSC Center in 2003 to almost 3 petaflop/s at OakRidge Leadership Computing Facility in 2009. By 2018 DOE supercomputers will achieve exaflop/s levels of performance. This million-fold increase over 16 years will spur a quantum leap forward in climate science as supercomputers enable the largest climate datasets, highest-resolution climate models, and speediest, most complex climate simulations ever. More>

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