Berkeley Lab Highlights from SC09

Berkeley Lab, SDSC and UCSD Win SC09 'Storage Challenge' Award

A research team from the Berkeley Lab and San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) won the Storage Challenge competition at SC09. The team's submission was based on the architecture of SDSC's recently announced Dash high-performance compute system, a "super-sized" version of flash memory-based devices such as laptops, digital cameras and thumb drives that also employs vSMP Foundation software from ScaleMP, Inc. to provide virtual symmetric multiprocessing capabilities. More>

First Full-Scale Simulation of Cat-Size Cortex is a Gordon Bell Prize Winner

A team of researchers from the IBM Almaden Research Center and the Lawrence Berkeleyl Lab, have performed the first near real-time cortical simulation of the brain that exceeds the scale of a cat cortex and contains 1 billion spiking neurons and 10 trillion individual learning synapses. Their work was honored with a Gordon Bell Prize in the special category for development of innovative techniques that produce new levels of performance on a real application. More>

StarGate Demo at SC09 Shows How to Keep Astrophysics Data Out of Archival "Black Holes"

Some people claim that it's impossible to move terabytes of data between computing centers and the laboratories or universities where researchers sit. But in a live SC09 demo, data simulating cosmic structures of the early universe were streamed over a reserved 10-gigabits-per-second provided by ESnet, showing that these transfers can be done. More>

Berkeley Lab Selects IBM Technology to Power Cloud Computing Research

IBM and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) announced today that an IBM System x iDataPlex server will run the Lab's program to explore how cloud computing can be used to advance scientific discovery. The program, dubbed Magellan, will be a test bed for NERSC scientists to explore the effectiveness of cloud computing for their particular research problems.The program is funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act through the Department of Energy. More>

New Consortium to Tackle Challenge of Adapting Scientific Applications to Hybrid Multicore Systems

While hybrid multicore technologies will be a critical component in future high-end computing systems, most of today's scientific applications will require a significant re-engineering effort to take advantage of the resources provided by these systems. To address this challenge, three U.S. Department of Energy national laboratories, including the Berkeley Lab, and two leading universities have formed the Hybrid Multicore Consortium, or HMC, and held their first meeting at SC09. More>

Click here to visit the Berkeley Lab Computing Sciences' SC09 Website.

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