The latest news on projects and discoveries within the Computational Research Division and NERSC Division at Berkeley Lab http://www.lbl.gov/cs Amazon Web Services' new Cluster Compute Instances for the Amazon EC2, makes high-bandwidth, low-latency high performance computing resources available in a cloud-computing environment. To ensure that the new Amazon EC2 service will be able to handle a gamut of demanding HPC applications ranging from electronic design automation to financial services, Amazon Web Services staff worked closely with researchersin the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Computational Research Division (CRD), Information Technologies Division, and National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC). http://www.lbl.gov/cs/Archive/news071310.html The International Center for Computational Science is a new collaboration aimed at creating computational tools to help scientists make more effective use of new computing technologies. The center is located at the Berkeley Lab and the University of California at Berkeley, with partners at the University of Heidelberg in Germany and the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in China. http://www.lbl.gov/cs/CSnews/CSnews062910.html There are several layers of software that deal with I/O on high performance computing (HPC) systems. Getting these three layers of software to work together efficiently can have a big impact on a scientific code's performance. That's why the U.S. Department of Energy's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) has partnered with the nonprofit Hierarchical Data Format (HDF) Group to optimize the performance of the HDF5 library on modern HPC platforms. http://www.lbl.gov/cs/Archive/news062810.html A team of researchers from Berkeley Lab has received the Best Paper Award at ScienceCloud 2010, the 1st Workshop on Scientific Cloud Computing sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery. The paper, “Seeking Supernovae in the Clouds: A Performance Study,” was written by Keith Jackson and Lavanya Ramakrishnan of the Advanced Computing for Science Department (ACS), Karl Runge of the Physics Division and Rollin Thomas of the Computational Cosmology Center (C3). http://www.lbl.gov/cs/CSnews/CSnews062810.html In this video from Modeling the World, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Associate Lab Director for Computing Sciences Horst Simon discusses the inevitability of parallelism, a new Moore’s Law and the challenges to come – like programming a billion cores! http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=579614915271&ref=mf Researchers in the Computational Research Division (CRD) of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have received more than $4 million in funding for six projects that will help develop computational methods to answer some of the nation's most pressing questions regarding energy efficiency, climate stabilization, and next-generation, carbon-neutral energy sources. http://www.lbl.gov/cs/Archive/news061110a.html Performing high-resolution, high-fidelity, three-dimensional simulations of Type Ia supernovae requires not only algorithms that accurately represent the correct physics, but also codes that effectively harness the resources of the next generation supercomputers. The Berkeley Lab's Center for Computational Sciences and Engineering (CCSE) has developed two codes that can do just that. http://www.lbl.gov/cs/Archive/news061810.html