Top Stories:

NERSC Helps Illuminate 'Dark' Galaxies

Astronomers predict that large spiral galaxies, like our Milky Way, have hundreds of satellite galaxies orbiting around them. Using supercomputers at NERSC, researcher Sukanya Chakrabarti has developed a mathematical method to uncover these “dark” satellite galaxies. When she applied this method to our own Milky Way, Chakrabarti discovered a faint satellite might be lurking on the opposite side of the galaxy from Earth. More>

Boosting the Next Wave of Accelerators

Particle accelerators, such as CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, help physicists unlock the fundamental secrets of matter and the beginnings of our universe. But conventional accelerators are large and expensive. An emerging new class of compact accelerators is being designed to cost less and pack more power into much smaller spaces, like a tabletop. Now, a team of scientists computing at NERSC has perfected a new method that generates models anywhere from 10,000 to a million times faster than before. More>

ESnet Blog: IT In Depth at DUSEL

The Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory (DUSEL) is a research lab being constructed in the former Homestake gold mine in Lead, South Dakota, now resurrected to mine data about the earth, new life forms, and the universe itself. In this blog post, DUSEL's Cyberinfrastructure Chief Engineer Warren Matthews writes about how DUSEL reasearchers will leverage the Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) to explore fundamental questions in particle physics, nuclear physics and astrophysics. More>

ASCR Discovery: Team Ratchets Up Accuracy for Identifying Protein Bits

Anyone who has tried to match an unfamiliar bird’s features to its field guide portrait knows that reality rarely provides a perfect comparison to the ideal specimen. Researchers face the same challenge when they attempt to decode protein patterns in living cells. Using mass spectrometry, the technology of choice for protein identification, scientists try to match protein fragments, or peptides, against idealized patterns in peptide databases, but databases often provide a poor correspondence. That's where researchers at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) come in. Using bioinformatics techniques and NERSC systems, they've developed a pattern-matching algorithm that improves the accuracy of peptide identification by between 50 and 150 percent, compared with standard approaches. More>

NewsBytes:

New to Berkeley Lab Computing Sciences

Introducing: Patrick Dorn, Oliver Ruebel and Slim Chourou. More>

Juan Meza Is Named One of Top 200 Most Influential Hispanics in Technology

The editors of Hispanic Engineer & Information Technology magazine (HE&IT) have selected Juan Meza, interim head of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Computational Research Division, as one of the “Top 200 Most Influential Hispanics in Technology.” The winners were recognized for their excellence in work, strong commitment to their communities and leadership as role models. All the “Top 200” will be featured in the April 2011 issue of HE&IT magazine and have been invited to attend the Hispanic 200 Leadership Summit in Orlando, Fla. this summer. HE&IT magazine is distributed to engineering students at Hispanic-serving institutions, and to Hispanic professionals, high-level government and industry policy makers and executives across the country. More>

Japanese University Delegation Visits Berkeley Lab to Discuss Potential Collaborations

Representatives from Japan’s Tsukuba University’s Center for Computational Sciences (CCS) visited Berkeley Lab to meet with researchers from CRD and NERSC and explore areas of potential collaboration. The university is located 30 miles northeast of Tokyo in an area known as Tsukuba Science City, home to Japan’s national research facilities encompassing such fields as science, industry, agriculture and forestry, environment and space development. CCS has been involved in parallel computing research since 1977 and has historically deployed custom-designed systems tailored to scientific applications. More>

Berkeley Lab Staff Contribute to the SIAM Conference on Computational Science and Engineering

Dozens of Berkeley Lab Computing Sciences staff were featured at the annual SIAM Conference on Computational Science and Engineering held February 28–March 4 in Reno, Nevada. More>

Outreach:

Berkeley Lab Hosts Albany High Students on Job Shadow Day

As part of Albany High School’s annual Job Shadow Day, 19 juniors from the
school spent several hours shadowing Berkeley Lab scientists, mathematicians, engineers, technicians and communications staff. Based on their choice of potential career paths, students were matched with mentors at the main Lab facility at NERSC in Oakland and at the Potter Street biosciences research center. More>

Video Glossary: ESnet Experts Define Their Terms

In two new entries for the Berkeley Lab's video glossary, ESnet engineers Michael Sinatra and Eli Dart talk about the Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) , the Department of Energy's science network, and why we need them.

SULI Students Visit NERSC

On March 9, Elizabeth Bautista and Richard Gerber of NERSC showed students from the Department of Energy's Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internships (SULI) program around the facility's supercomputer room. This program places students in paid internships in Science and Engineering at any of several Department of Energy facilities.

In the News:

GCN: Why High-Performance Clouds Are Best Kept In-house

Most commercial entities don’t have the infrastructure to handle the intensive workloads of high-performance computing. And, if they do, it will probably be more expensive – in one case, 10 times more expensive – for them to run dedicated services than for some agencies to run their own private clouds. More>

HPCwire: New Computer Science Book Explores Performance Analysis

David Bailey and Sam Williams of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Computational Research Division (CRD) recently published a book called Performance Tuning of Scientific Applications, which presents current research in performance analysis from some of the most notable experts in the field. More>

Markest: DOE Technology Enables High-speed Data Transfer

GridFTP, a protocol developed by researchers at Argonne National Laboratory, has been used to transfer unprecedented amounts of data over the Department of Energy's (DOE) Energy Sciences Network (ESnet), which provides a reliable, high-performance communications infrastructure to facilitate large-scale, collaborative science endeavors. More>

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