Science Features:

NERSC Continues Tradition of Cosmic Microwave Background Data Analysis with the Planck Cluster

Armed with a new spacecraft called Planck and supercomputers at NERSC, astronomers around the world hope to make tremendous strides toward illuminating the nature and origins of dark matter and dark energy by creating high-resolution maps of subtle variations in the temperature and polarization of the Cosmic Microwave Background. More>

It's Not Too Late

Computer simulations on more than 2000 processors of Franklin, the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center's (NERSC) Cray XT4 system, as well as computers at the Oak Ridge and Argonne Leadership Computing Facilities and at National Center for Atmospheric Research, show that cuts in greenhouse gas emissions would save arctic ice and reduce sea level rise. More>

American Recovery and Reinvestment Act Updates:

DOE to Explore Scientific Cloud Computing at Argonne, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories

Cloud computing is gaining traction in the commercial world, but can such an approach also meet the computing and data storage demands of the nation's scientific community? A new Department of Energy program will examine cloud computing as a cost-effective and energy-efficient computing paradigm for scientists to accelerate discoveries in a variety of disciplines. More>

NERSC Overcomes Software Challenges for Scientific Computing

To ensure that science effectively adapts to the "multicore revolution," NERSC is developing the Computational Science and Engineering Petascale Initiative. More>

Berkeley Lab Researchers Prepare U.S. Climate Community for 100-Gigabit Data Transfers

Climate 100 will help ensure that the climate research community effectively uses the planned 100 gigabit-per-second networks. This project will bring together middleware and network researchers to develop the needed tools and techniques for moving unprecedented amounts of climate data. More>

Berkeley Researchers Win NSF PetaApps Award for CMB Applications

Experts predict that the volume of Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) data will increase 1000-fold over the next 15 years and push the limits for scientific computing. With an award from National Science Foundation's (NSF) PetaApps program, Horst Simon and Julian Borrill will be co-leading a project to develop a new benchmark tool for testing whole-system performance on emerging extreme-scale supercomputing systems. This benchmark will also ensure that future computing systems will meet the demands of the CMB community. More>

Newsbytes:

NEW to Berkeley Lab Computing Sciences Team

Introducing: Hing Chow, Inder Monga, Andew Lake, Chris Tracy, Josef Grosch and Biju Jacob. More>

B-ISICLES (Berkeley Ice Sheet Initiative for Climate at Extreme Scales) Project to Improve Accuracy of Ice Sheet Models

One of the most-cited examples of global climate change is retreating ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland. But the details of how fast they are melting is a mystery that may be solved with a new generation of computer simulations. Researchers from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Computational Research Division and Los Alamos National Laboratory are collaborating to develop parallel adaptive mesh refinement techniques for the Community Ice Sheet Modeling code known as GLIMMER-CISM. These algorithms will allow researchers to model points of interest, like the retreating edges of ice sheets, at unprecedented resolution. More>

Photostory: Phase-1 of Hopper Delivered to NERSC

The first phase of NERSC's next-generation supercomputer was delivered to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Oakland Scientific Facility on October 12. The system that was delivered is a Cray XT5™ massively parallel processor supercomputer. When completed, the new system will deliver a peak performance of more than one petaflops. This machine is named after Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper, who was an American computer scientist and United States Naval officer. More>

NERSC Results Help University of Florida Student Win Metropolis Award

Chao Cao was awarded the 2009 Metropolis Award for outstanding doctoral thesis work in computational physics earlier this year by the American Physics Society.  His award-winning thesis, "First-Principles and Multi-Scale Modeling of Nano-Scale Systems," used results generated primarily on NERSC's Cray XT4 system and the Opteron cluster named Jacquard. More>

ASCR Discovery: Lasers Without Mirrors, Designed by Supercomputer

To model for phenomena that can hamper beam quality in Free Electron Laser (FEL) designs, scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory will simulate evolution of the electron beam from its origin to its fate as a photon source with the Cray XT computer, called Franklin, at NERSC. More>

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