Top Stories:

NERSC Helps Illuminate 'Dark' Galaxies

Astronomers predict that large spiral galaxies, like our Milky Way, have hundreds of satellite galaxies orbiting around them. Using supercomputers at NERSC, researcher Sukanya Chakrabarti has developed a mathematical method to uncover these “dark” satellite galaxies. When she applied this method to our own Milky Way, Chakrabarti discovered a faint satellite might be lurking on the opposite side of the galaxy from Earth. More>

Boosting the Next Wave of Accelerators

Particle accelerators, such as CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, help physicists unlock the fundamental secrets of matter and the beginnings of our universe. But conventional accelerators are large and expensive. An emerging new class of compact accelerators is being designed to cost less and pack more power into much smaller spaces, like a tabletop. Now, a team of scientists computing at NERSC has perfected a new method that generates models anywhere from 10,000 to a million times faster than before. More>

ASCR Discovery: Team Ratchets Up Accuracy for Identifying Protein Bits

Anyone who has tried to match an unfamiliar bird’s features to its field guide portrait knows that reality rarely provides a perfect comparison to the ideal specimen. Researchers face the same challenge when they attempt to decode protein patterns in living cells. Using mass spectrometry, the technology of choice for protein identification, scientists try to match protein fragments, or peptides, against idealized patterns in peptide databases, but databases often provide a poor correspondence. That's where researchers at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) come in. Using bioinformatics techniques and NERSC systems, they've developed a pattern-matching algorithm that improves the accuracy of peptide identification by between 50 and 150 percent, compared with standard approaches. More>

NewsBytes:

Japanese University Delegation Visits Berkeley Lab to Discuss Potential Collaborations

Representatives from Japan’s Tsukuba University’s Center for Computational Sciences (CCS) visited Berkeley Lab to meet with researchers from CRD and NERSC and explore areas of potential collaboration. The university is located 30 miles northeast of Tokyo in an area known as Tsukuba Science City, home to Japan’s national research facilities encompassing such fields as science, industry, agriculture and forestry, environment and space development. CCS has been involved in parallel computing research since 1977 and has historically deployed custom-designed systems tailored to scientific applications. More>

Berkeley Lab Hosts Albany High Students on Job Shadow Day

As part of Albany High School’s annual Job Shadow Day, 19 juniors from the
school spent several hours shadowing Berkeley Lab scientists, mathematicians, engineers, technicians and communications staff. Based on their choice of potential career paths, students were matched with mentors at the main Lab facility at NERSC in Oakland and at the Potter Street biosciences research center. More>

Video Glossary: ESnet Experts Define Their Terms

In two new entries for the Berkeley Lab's video glossary, ESnet engineers Michael Sinatra and Eli Dart talk about the Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) , the Department of Energy's science network, and why we need them.

SULI Students Visit NERSC

On March 9, Elizabeth Bautista and Richard Gerber of NERSC showed students from the Department of Energy's Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internships (SULI) program around the facility's supercomputer room. This program places students in paid internships in Science and Engineering at any of several Department of Energy facilities.

In the News:

GCN: Why High-Performance Clouds Are Best Kept In-house

Most commercial entities don’t have the infrastructure to handle the intensive workloads of high-performance computing. And, if they do, it will probably be more expensive – in one case, 10 times more expensive – for them to run dedicated services than for some agencies to run their own private clouds. More>

HPCwire: New Computer Science Book Explores Performance Analysis

David Bailey and Sam Williams of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Computational Research Division (CRD) recently published a book called Performance Tuning of Scientific Applications, which presents current research in performance analysis from some of the most notable experts in the field. More>

Find out where NERSC and Berkeley Lab Computing Sciences stories have been mentioned in the news.

Read more issues of NERSC News. Receive weekly updates from the Berkeley Lab Computing Sciences Communications team on Facebook and Twitter. Please contact Linda Vu, to subscribe to the monthly Berekeley Lab Computing Sciences Newsletter.