May 2010
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The Director of the Joint Genome Institute (JGI), Eddy Rubin, announced that Victor Markowitz will serve as the new Chief Informatics Officer and Associate Director at JGI. More>
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Silica is one of the most common minerals on Earth. Not only does it make up two-thirds of our planet’s crust, it is also used to create a variety of materials from glass to fiber optic cables. Yet new results generated by a team of physicists from Ohio State University, using NERSC supercomputers, show that this mineral only populates our planet superficially—in other words, silica is relatively uncommon deep within the Earth. More>
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Three thousand researchers in 37 countries are searching for the origins of mass, new dimensions of space and undiscovered forces of physics in the head-on collisions of high-energy protons at the Large Hadron Collider's ATLAS experiment. To facilitate this distributed workflow, these researchers are relying on a software framework called Athena, which was developed with the help of scientists in the Berkeley Lab's CRD and Physics Division. More>
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Cloud parameterizations are the greatest source of uncertainty in today's climate models. Researchers using supercomputers at NERSC are working to clear up that uncertainty by developing and testing a new kind of global climate model, called a global cloud resolving model (GCRM)—a model that's designed to take advantage of the extreme-scale computers expected in the near future. More>
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A new system is in production at NERSC, which provides high-performance computing resources to 3,000 users annually, in disciplines ranging from computational cosmology to nanoscience. Built on IBM iDataPlex technology, the new system is called “Carver” in honor of American scientist and inventor George Washington Carver. The new platform replaces NERSC’s Opteron “Jacquard” cluster and IBM Power5 “Bassi” system, which were both decommissioned at the end of April. Carver is comprises 400 compute nodes interconnected by the latest 4X QDR InfiniBand technology. More>
Introducing: Sowmya Balasubramanian. More>
Applied math researchers in Berkeley Lab’s Computational Research Division (CRD) played a significant role in the DOE Applied Mathematics Program Meeting held May 3-5 in Berkeley. Lab mathematicians contributed both talks and posters to the technical program. More>
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This month, NERSC hosted ScicomP 16, the annual meeting of the IBM HPC Systems Scientific Computing User Group, on May 10–14 in San Francisco. Scientists, engineers, and IBM staff gathered to share real-world experiences porting, tuning, and running codes on IBM supercomputers. More>
Every year, Microsoft Research organizes the Silicon Valley TechFair to highlight the company’s work with the research community. At this year’s event on May 6, the Berkeley Water Center was highlighted both in the opening address and in a video produced for the event. The video focuses on the “digital watershed,” a project between Microsoft Research, Berkeley Lab’s Advanced Computing for Science (ACS) Department and UC Berkeley to develop better tools for storing and accessing data on water resources. This video features ACS Department Head Deb Agarwal. More>
NERSC users Andrea Bertozzi (UCLA), Adam Burrows (Princeton), Gary Glatzmaier (UC Santa Cruz), and John Wilkins (Ohio State University) are among the 229 leaders in the sciences, social sciences, humanities, arts, business and public affairs who have been elected members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Founded in 1780 by John Adams, James Bowdoin, John Hancock, and other scholar-patriots, the Academy is an independent policy research center that conducts multidisciplinary studies of complex and emerging problems. Alumni of the Academy include George Washington and Benjamin Franklin in the eighteenth century, Daniel Webster and Ralph Waldo Emerson in the nineteenth, and Albert Einstein and Winston Churchill in the twentieth. Click here for a list of the 2010 fellows.
The Best Paper award at CUG2010, the Cray User Group meeting held May 24–27 at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, went to “Application Acceleration on Current and Future Cray Platforms” written by Alice Koniges, Robert Preissl, and Jihan Kim of NERSC; David Eder, Aaron Fisher, Nathan Masters, and Velimir Mlaker of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; Stephane Ethier and Weixing Wang of Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory; Martin Head-Gordon of UC Berkeley and LBNL’s Chemical Sciences Division; and Nathan Wichmann of Cray Inc. This paper examines three different applications and means for improving their performance with a particular emphasis on methods that are applicable for many/multicore and future architectural designs.
One of two runner-ups for Best Paper was “Analyzing the Effect of Different Programming Models upon Performance and Memory Usage on Cray XT5 Platforms” by Hongzhang Shan of Berkeley Lab/CRD; Haoqiang Jin of NASA Ames; Karl Fuerlinger of UC Berkeley; and Alice Koniges and Nicholas J. Wright of NERSC. This paper looks at memory requirements and performance of the NAS parallel benchmarks in various languages including UPC and hybrid models. Jaguar and Hopper performance are also compared and discussed.
ESnet is a high-speed network serving thousands of Department of Energy scientists at over 40 institutions, as well as connecting to more than 100 other networks. In this video, ESnet engineers discuss what it takes to manage a world-class science network. More>
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