Top Stories:

Reading the Cosmic Writing on the Wall

Using supercomputers at NERSC, the Planck collaboration, including researchers in CRD's Computational Cosmology Cener, have pegged the age, recipe and acceleration rate for our universe give or take three percent. In short, the universe is 100 million years older; it has more matter and less dark energy than previously thought. It’s also lumpier and is expanding more slowly. And, they confirmed that the universe is geometrically flat. More>

BISICLES Captures the Details of Retreating Antarctic Ice

Satellite observations suggest that the shrinking West Antarctic ice sheet is contributing to global sea level rise. But until recently, scientists could not accurately model the physical processes driving retreat of the ice sheet. Now, a new ice sheet model—BISICLES—is shedding light on these details. More>

Computer Simulations Yield Clues to How Cells Interact with Surroundings

Using NERSC resources, Berkeley Lab researchers have developed a computer model of integrin, a protein that converts mechanical forces from outside the cell into internal chemical signals that tell the cell what to do. When they misfire, integrins can cause diseases such as atherosclerosis and several types of cancer. More>

NewsBytes:

New to Berkeley Lab Computing Sciences

Introducing: Gilberto Pastorello, Bharat Medasani and Anshu Dubey. More>

ACM Council on Women Names Kathy Yelick Athena Lecturer

The Association for Computing Machinery's Council on Women in Computing (ACM-W) has named Katherine Yelick, Berkeley Lab's Associate Laboratory Director for Computing Sciences, as the 2013-2014 Athena Lecturer. Yelick, also a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, has improved fundamental understanding and practice of parallel programming, which uses multiple processing elements simultaneously to solve a problem. More>

Video: "Imagining What's Possible"

ESnet's Eric Pouyoul was one of a handful of speakers invited to speak at an event organized by US Ignite, a non-profit organization that fosters the creation of next-generation Internet applications that provide transformative public benefit. In his 30-minute presentation, Pouyoul made the case for more bandwidth to accommodate the growth in size of scientific data sets. He also agreed with several other speakers that about the need to remove the complexity that haunts today’s networks. A video of his talk can be viewed here.

Meeting the Computing Challenges of Next-Gen Climate Models

As global climate models improve, they are generating ever larger amounts of data. For Michael Wehner, a climate scientist in CRD who focuses on extreme weather—such as the intense hurricanes, “derecho” and atmospheric rivers (or “pineapple express”) like the one that California saw last December—computing challenges are key to his work. From March 20-22, Berkeley Lab hosted an international workshop to address some of these issues. More>

ESnet’s FasterData Site Is Popular International Destination

For the past 15 years or so, ESnet's Brian Tierney has maintained FasterData.es.net, an online repository of tips and tricks for improving network performance. Last year, 83,649 unique visitors landed at FasterData, making 120,776 visits and viewing 213,151 pages. More>

ESnet’s Work in SDN, Energy Efficiency Highlighted at Global Networking Conference

ESnet's contribution to the global networking community continues to gain momentum, most recently going up a notch or two with a series of talks, vendor presentations and a demo at OFC/NFOEC 2013, the Optical Fiber Communication Conference and Exposition (OFC) and the National Fiber Optic Engineers Conference, held March 17-21 in Los Angeles. More>

Women @ Energy: Kathy Yelick

A new series from the Department of Energy's Office of Economic Imact and Diversity, called Women @ Energy, showcases employees who are helping change the world. In this profile, Berkeley Lab's Associate Director for Computing Sciences talks about what inspired her to work in STEM, what excites her about working at DOE and more. More>

Outreach:

CRD Staff Host Albany High Students on Job Shadow Day

On Thursday, March 14, Berkeley Lab staff members hosted Albany High School juniors as part of the school's annual Job Shadow Day. In the Computational Research Division (CRD), Hans Johansen and Terry Ligocki of the Applied Numerical Algorithms Group, Andy Nonaka of the Center for Computational Sciences and Engineering and Daniela Ushizima of the Visualization Group volunteered as hosts. More>

Richmond High School Students Visit Berkeley Lab

As part of Berkeley Lab Computing Sciences' ongoing outreach efforts with the Kennedy High School IT Academy in Richmond, 11 students and two teachers spent half the day March 20 learning about different career opportunities in computing and networking. The event was organized to give the students ideas about career paths beyond the basics of computer science and web design taught in the classroom. More>

NERSC Intern Wins Award for Computing Achievement

Stephanie Cabanela, a student intern in NERSC's Operation Technologies Group was honored with a National Center for Women and Information Technology (NCWIT) Aspirations in Computing award on Saturday, March 16, 2013 in a ceremony in San Jose, CA. The award honors young women at the high school level for their computing-related achievements and interests. A senior classman at Lowell High School in San Francisco, Cabanela was one of hundreds in the Bay Area to compete for this award. More>

Taghrid Samak Works to Impact Social Development in Egypt

On March 23 and 24, CRD's Taghrid Samak chaired the 2013 EgyptNEGMA (Networking, Entrepreneurship, Growth, Mobilization, and Action) conference to review 10 finalist proposals for advancing social development in Egypt. The organizers of the top projects will go on an incubation trip to further network and receive more in-depth feedback through working groups based around their specific proposals. More>

In the News:

CNN: The Historical Analogs of Brilliant Women

In honor of Women’s History Month, CNN took a look at contemporary innovators in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) and their historical analogs—including Associate Lab Director Kathy Yelick and her programming language predecessor, Grace Murray Hopper (Yelick is profile #5). More>

HPC Source: Meet HPC Innovator Chin Guok

HPC Source profiles ESnet's Chin Guok, touching on his work with Software Defined Networking and OSCARS, as well as the career path that led him to help run the world's fastest science network. More>

France24: The Future of Energy—Data Centers Incentives for Going Green

A news video from France 24 includes excerpts of interviews with Brent Draney (NERSC) and John Shalf (NERSC and CRD)— Draney discussing running an energy-efficient computing center, and Shalf discussing his research into energy-efficient computer chips. The video is available in English and French.

The Simons Foundation / WIRED: In Computers We Trust?

An article in the Simons Foundation News, "In Computers We Trust?" asks whether mathematics can still be done without computers. "The time when someone can do real, publishable mathematics completely without the aid of a computer is coming to a close," comments David Bailey, head of CRD’s Complex Systems Group and the author of several books on computational mathematics. "Or if you do, you’re going to be increasingly restricted into some very specialized realms." The story was also picked up by WIRED. More>

MarketWatch: Participants in 100G Workshop Consider Next Steps for Optical Networks

An article in Dow Jones MarketWatch gives an overview of the recent 100G and Beyond Workshop, sponsored by the California Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), the Energy Sciences Network (ESnet), and the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC). The workshop examined 100-gigabit networking and the ways in which it will impact areas as diverse as data-intensive science, health care, media arts applications, smart manufacturing, and more. ESnet Director Greg Bell and NERSC Networking, Security, and Servers Group Lead Brent Draney are among the people quoted in the article. More>

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

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