Research
The Berkeley Lab Computing Sciences organization enables and advances computational research throughout the DOE science community. NERSC and ESnet provide high performance computing and networking resources and expertise to DOE researchers nationwide, and the Computational Research Division (CRD) collaborates with researchers to develop new and improved computational approaches to scientific problems.
Computation has joined experiment and theory as one of the three principal elements of modern scientific research. Computational modeling and simulation are helping to solve problems that cannot be solved by traditional experimental methods because they are prohibitively large or small, unfold too quickly or too slowly, or cost too much. And many of the data sets produced by modern experiments and observations are so large that scientific discovery depends on computational analysis of the results. All of the research programs in the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science have identified major scientific challenges that can only be addressed through advances in scientific computing.
Developing computational models of physical phenomena involves three kinds of research:
- Applied mathematics provides the algorithms (mathematical recipes) to be used in the computer code.
- Computer science provides programming languages and tools, computer systems software and middleware, and the hardware on which the scientific application will run.
- Computational science creates mathematical models of the phenomena to be researched, then uses the programming languages, tools, and algorithms to create codes that run efficiently on high performance computers.
CRD staff are actively involved in all three areas of research and development. NERSC and ESnet staff participate in advanced development projects that support their missions when commercial products do not meet the needs of the DOE scientific research community. The following links provide an introduction to these activities:
- SciDAC at Berkeley Lab
- High Performance Computing Research Department
- Biological Data Management and Technology Center
- Distributed Systems Department
- Energy Efficient Computing Research
- Projects at NERSC
- ESnet Network Research and Development
- Computational Cosmology Center
- Universal Parallel Computing Research Center (ParLab)
- Cal CSE: Multidisciplinary Research and Education in Computational Science and Engineering
A list of technical reports authored by Computing Sciences researchers can be found here.
