Top Stories:

Berkeley Lab Computational Scientists to Help Illuminate Dark Universe

As part of a new Department of Energy collaboration aimed at illuminating the 95 percent of the universe known as dark matter and dark energy, researchers in Berkeley Lab’s Computational Research Division will apply their scientific computing expertise in simulation and analysis to boost the success of next-generation cosmology experiments. More>

End-to-End Network Tuning Sends Data Screaming from NERSC to NOAA

As an associate scientist in the Earth System Research Lab of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Gary Bates has transferred hundreds of thousands of files to and from NERSC, as part of a "reforecasting" weather forecasting project. Earlier this year, Bates successfully transferred 170 terabytes of data from NERSC back to NOAA Boulder at a whopping rate of 395 megabytes per second, with help from NERSC and ESnet staff. More>

Berkeley Lab Scientists to Help Develop Software for Exascale Supercomputers

With petascale supercomputers—systems capable of performing quadrillions of operations per second—now becoming the norm in high-end scientific computing, exascale systems are now on the horizon. Expected to become available by the end of this decade, exascale supercomputers will be 1,000 times faster than today’s petascale machines. To address the challenge of developing a software stack for exascale systems, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is funding a number of research efforts under the X-Stack program. Computer scientists in the Computing Sciences organization at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory will contribute their expertise to three X-Stack projects. More>

Berkeley Lab Scientists to Lead, Support 14 New SciDAC Projects

When the Department of Energy announced the series of projects under the latest Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) program, Berkeley Lab scientists, mathematicians and computer scientists were listed as key contributors in three institutes and 11 science application partnerships. Funding for the projects is expected to total about $6 million annually over the next three to five years. More>

NewsBytes:

New to Berkeley Lab Computing Sceinces

Introducing: Alexander Kemper, 2012 Luis W. Alvarez Fellow. More>

NERSC Postdoc Creates a Way to Share Burgeoning X-Ray Data

Researchers, who naturally want to publish their results first, don’t often share their data. But unexpected discoveries may lurk in the tidal wave of information flooding in from fields like x-ray imaging. The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center's Filipe Maia has created the Coherent X-ray Imaging Data Bank (CXIDB), which premiered in February with x ray-diffraction images of mimivirus, one of the world’s largest viruses, made by an international team working at SLAC’s Linac Coherent Light Source. Maia’s colleague Stefano Marchesini of the ALS says the pioneering initiative, described in the current issue of Nature Methods, “will usher in a new era of open access data.”

Wes Bethel and Hank Childs Co-Edit Book on High Performance Visualization

Wes Bethel and Hank Childs of CRD, along with Charles Hansen of the University of Utah, have edited the book High Performance Visualization: Enabling Extreme-Scale Scientific Insight, which is now available for order from CRC Press. The publication date is October 19. The book focuses on algorithm design, implementation, and optimization for visualization and analysis tools on emerging multi- and many-core platforms. It collects some of the most seminal work in the field, including algorithms and implementations running at the highest levels of concurrency and used by scientific researchers worldwide.

Other CRD staff who contributed to the book include Oliver Rübel, Prabhat, Kesheng John Wu, David Camp, Mark Howison, Gunther Weber, and Hari Krishnan. Berkeley Lab Deputy Director Horst Simon wrote the foreword.

ESnet’s Greg Bell Gave Invited Keynote Talk at Scandinavian Networking Conference

Greg Bell, director of Berkeley Lab's Scientific Networking Division, gave the closing keynote address at the 2012 NORDUnet conference in Oslo, Norway on Thursday, Sept. 20. NORDUnet is a joint collaboration by the five Nordic national research and education networks in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. ESnet has collaborated with NORDUnet on common methodologies for reserving end-to-end bandwidth to accelerate large data transfers, and on standards development for the emerging Network Service Interface protocol.

In his talk, “Network as Instrument: the View from Berkeley,” Bell argued that "it's time to start thinking about research networks as instruments for discovery, not as infrastructures for service-delivery." He explained "how ESnet's strategy is influenced by its unusual institutional context: embedded in a US national laboratory, classified as a user facility, and located uphill from a famously audacious university.”

"Flying Through the Known Universe" Screens at 3D Film Festival in L.A.

A 3D movie flight through hundreds of thousands of galaxies at considerably faster than the speed of light had its world-premiere screening at the 3D Film Festival in Los Angeles, Ca. Created by Yushu Yao of NERSC, with Prabhat of Berkeley Lab's Computational Research Division and David Schlegel of Berkeley Lab's Physics Division, the movie’s Sloan Digital Sky Survey data includes photos of some of the actual galaxies. A 2D peek – the view from the left eye – is temporarily available here.

In the News:

NY Times Contrasts Data Center Wastefulness with NERSC Efficiency

In a story titled “Power, Pollution and the Internet,” the New York Times reports that most data centers, by design, consume vast amounts of energy in an incongruously wasteful manner, wasting 90 percent or more of the electricity they pull off the grid. Worldwide, the digital warehouses use about 30 billion watts of electricity, roughly equivalent to the output of 30 nuclear power plants. The article compares the 7 to 12 percent computer utilization typical at data centers with the 96.4 percent utilization NERSC achieved in July. More>

Scientific Computing Magazine: Insights from the Top500 List

Erich Strohmaier, leader of Future Technologies Group in the Computational Research Division, has written a cover story for Scientific Computing magazine on how the twice-yearly TOP500 list of the world's top supercomputers provides a good lock at the state of HPC technology. As one of the founding editors of the list, Strohmaier has compiled 39 lists since 1993. More>

WIRED: Intel and AMD Follow in Footsteps of Mysterious Google Switch

Computer and Data Sciences Department Head John Shalf was quoted in a Wired article explaining why Intel and AMD are building new networking fabric directly into chips and servers. More>

CIO: Intel and HP to Build World's Most Efficient Supercomputer

Future Technologies Group Lead Erich Strohmaier was quoted in this CIO news story about Intel and HP teaming up to build the world’s most efficient supercomputer at DOE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory. More>

The Conversation: Smart meters are about as dangerous as …

In an editorial for The Conversation, CRD's Complex Systems Group Lead David Bailey and University of Newcastle Mathematics Professor Jonathan Borwein debunk myths about the dangers of Smart Meters. More>

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