Top Stories:

New Accelerator Will Study Steps on the Path to Fusion Power

The Neutralized Drift Compression Experiment, NDCX-II has recently marked successful completion. Designed with the aid of computer simulations executed at NERSC, the accelerator was created to study warm dense matter, an important research field in itself and particularly relevant to nuclear fusion. NDCX-II will test a variety of technologies in preparation for a new generation of power plants on Earth that will mimic the engines of the stars. More>

Floating Robots Track Water Flow

To understand how water flows through the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, 100 mobile sensors were placed into the Sacramento River on May 9 to make critical measurements every few seconds. Once collected, this data is transmitted to NERSC for assimilation and analysis. More>

Turning Water into Hydrogen Fuel

The titanium-based catalysts use light to split water into oxygen and hydrogen, to synthesize or degrade various organic molecules and for many other applications including fuel cells, solar cells and other devices. To take these materials to the next step demands knowledge-based design and modification of their surface, which is a key in the catalytic process. Researhers know that titanium dioxide often needs an even layer of hydroxyl groups across its surface to to its job; now thanks to a new method by scientists at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, the catalyst is now getting it. In addition, using supercomputers at NERSC, the team found that the hydrogen atoms on the surface didn't migrate inside the material when the catalyst is heated. The hydrogen atoms combine with the catalyst's lattice oxygen to create water. More>

Scientists Are Studying Photosynthesis to Generate Clean Electricity

Inspired by plants, scientists have created a light-harvesting material that can turn sunlight into chemical energy. However, creating a stable form of the material for large-scale usage has proved difficult. Using supercomputers at NERSC and the Texas Advanced Computing Center, a team of researchers from the University of Houston, Texas, explored the role that confinement, temperature, and solvents play in the stability and energy efficiency of a light-harvesting material called, the carotenoid-porphyrin-C60 molecular triad. Their results provide a way to test, tailor, and engineer nano-capsules with embedded triads that, when combined in large numbers, could greatly increase the ability to produce clean energy. More>

Awards:

Mathematician John Bell Elected to National Academy of Sciences

John Bell, an applied mathematician and computational scientist who leads the Center for Computational Sciences and Engineering and the Mathematics and Computational Science Department at Berkeley Lab, has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences. He is one of only two mathematicians on this year’s list. More>

Hank Childs Wins 2012 DOE Early Career Award

Hank Childs of the Computational Research Division's Visualization Group has been honored with a 2012 DOE Early Career Award. This is the third year of the Early Career Research Program managed by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science, and Childs is one of four researchers from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) who were honored. In total, there were 68 award recipients from 47 institutions. More>

Didem Unat, A 2012 Alvarez Fellow

As one of two 2012 Luis W. Alvarez Fellows, Didem Unat will be designing programming models for future exascale architectures, as part of the Hardware Software Co-design project in Berkeley Lab's Computational Research Division. Specifically, Unat will be evaluating the performance of fluid dynamics and combustion kernels on current architectures, and project their performance on future systems. She will be targeting data locality issues and providing novel programming concepts for improving performance on exascale systems. More>

NewsBytes:

New to Berkeley Lab Computing Sciences

Introducing: Jonathon Bertsch and Mary Hester. More>

High School Girls Mentored by Berkeley Lab Win "Best Science App" Contest

After taking top honors among their peers from Albany and Berkeley High Schools, a team of five girls from Albany High beat out 10 other teams from high schools around the country to win the 2012 Technovation Challenge. The challenge is a 10-week program in which teams of girls develop science education apps for smartphones. The team was mentored by Sufia Haque of Berkeley Lab’s Engineering Division and Taghrid Samak of the Computational Research Division. In all, 24 women at the Lab served as mentors to girls participating in the program. More>

ESnet Blog: The Risks of Not Deploying IPv6 in the R&E Community

In anticipation of World IPv6 Day 2012 on June 6, ESnet's resident IPv6 expert Michael Sinatra discusses the advantages of IPv6, risks of not deploying the new network protocol and reasons to move forward in this Network Matters blog post. More>

ESnet Shars Expertise at Europe’s Premier Networking Conference

ESnet staff members Eric Pouyoul, Jon Dugan, and Bill Johnston were among the speakers presenting at the 2012 TERENA Networking Conference held May 21–24 in Reykjavík, Iceland. The conference, sponsored by the Trans-European Research and Education Networking Association, is the largest and most prestigious European research networking conference. More>

In the News:

ALICE2: R&E Networks As Instruments for Discovery, Not Just Infrastructures

In an interview with the ALICE project (América Latina Interconectada Con Europa), ESnet Acting Division Director Greg Bell describes his vision of R&E networks in the future as instruments for discovery, not just infrastructre. More>

ASCR Discovery: Designers Dig Out Drawing Board in Quest for Exascale Computing

ASCR Discovery reports that the architects of tomorrow’s exascale computers are designing systems that borrow from and contribute to an unlikely source: the consumer electronics industry. The result will be systems exquisitely designed to meet the needs of scientists studying complex systems such as jet engine efficiency, large-scale weather patterns, and earthquake models. Associate Lab Director Kathy Yelick and CRD Advanced Technologies Group Lead John Shalf are among the experts interviewed. More>

San Francisco Chronicle: Robots measure flow of Sacramento River

To understand how water flows through the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, 100 mobile sensors were placed into the Sacramento River on May 9 to make critical measurements every few seconds. Once collected, this data is transmitted to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) for assimilation and analysis. More>

Huffington Post: 2001: A Space Odyssey: Art vs. 2012 Reality

In a column for the Huffington Post, CRD’s Complex Systems Group Lead David Bailey and University of Newcastle Mathematics Professor Jonathan Borwein take score on which predictions from Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey have been borne out in the 44 years since the movie's release, and which have not. More>

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