December 2008
ASCR Monthly News Roundup
The latest survey of computing news of interest to ASCR was compiled by Jon Bashor (JBashor@lbl.gov) with news provided by Argonne, Fermi, Lawrence Berkeley, Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, Pacific Northwest and Sandia National labs. Contact information and links to additional information, where available, are included with each article.
Link to the Web Page>

November 18, 2008
DOE-Humanities Projects Announced
Washington DC — Last year, the DOE announced a partnership with the National Endowment for the Humanities to facilitate access to high performance computing resources for research in the Humanities.  At the Supercomputing 2008 conference in Austin, Texas the Endowment announced the winners of the program. The goal of the program is to provide opportunities for humanities scholars whose research requires high performance computing to collaborate with computer scientists and others at centers already familiar with the challenges of intensive data mining, visualization, and other demanding applications.  For additional information about the about the program, follow this link>

November 10, 2008
DOE’s Oak Ridge Supercomputer Now World’s Fastest for Open Science
Oak Ridge TN — DOE’s Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility is home to the world’s first petaflop supercomputer dedicated to open scientific research.  The new petaflops machine will make it possible to address some of the most challenging scientific problems in areas such as climate modeling, renewable energy, materials science, fusion and combustion.  Annually, 80 percent of Jaguar's resources are allocated through DOE's Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program, a competitively selected, peer reviewed process open to researchers from universities, industry, government and non-profit organizations.
Read the Full Press Release>

October 27, 2008
U.S. Energy Department Streamlines Access to High-Tech User Facilities at DOE National Laboratories
Oak Ridge TN — The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Technology Transfer Coordinator, Under Secretary for Science Dr. Raymond L. Orbach, announced today two new model agreements that will expand access to DOE’s world-class research facilities by academia and industry.  The streamlined agreements will also simplify the process for gaining access to DOE facilities and promote the transfer of cutting-edge technologies from DOE national laboratories.
Read the DOE Press Release>

September 10, 2008
ESnet Helps Distribute LHC Data
Washington DC — ESnet helps researchers seeking the Origins of Matter.The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will produce an enormous amount of data and in the forefront of providing researchers access to that data is ESnet.  ESnet foresaw this data challenge years ago and developed ESnet 4, a new large-scale science data transport network with enough bandwidth to transport the expected massive amounts of data.
More>

September 8, 2008
NOAA’s Climate Change Models Granted Run Time
on ASCR Supercomputers
Intrepid, Jaguar and Franklin, three of ASCR's premier supercomputers, will be utilized by the Commerce Department’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to explore advanced climate change models.  10 million hours of computing time will be made available for collaborative climate research on the three world-class supercomputers under a three-year agreement signed by DOE and NOAA.
Link to the DOE Press Release>

August 22, 2008
Hope for those with Parkinson’s
Washington DC — At least half a million people in the U.S. are believed to suffer from Parkinson’s and about 50,000 new cases are diagnosed each year, the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke reports.  A research team has performed a detailed computer simulation on how certain proteins damage cell membranes and create pores, which in the case of Parkinson's disease, can lead debilitating systems that worsen over time.  The research simulation, which generated a promising lead for a treatment, was performed with a grant of 1.2 million processor hours on the Blue Gene/P at DOE's Argonne National Laboratory through the ASCR Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program.
Read the Full Press Release>

August, 2008
Carl Edward Oliver - 1943-2008
The Office of Science and its Office of Advanced Scientific Computing research (ASCR) were saddened by the loss of Carl Edward Oliver, a former Associate Director of ASCR.
Read More>

July 22, 2008
DOE Funded Research Projects Win 30 R&D Awards for 2008
Washington DC — U.S. Secretary of Energy Samuel W. Bodman announced today that researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) National Laboratories and Y-12 National Security Complex have won 30 of the 100 awards given out this year by R&D Magazine for the most outstanding technology developments with promising commercial potential.  The coveted awards are presented annually in recognition of exceptional new products, processes, materials or software developed throughout the world and introduced into the market the previous year.  One award was for FastBit, an indexing technology software tool for data analyses or data mining, which is funded by ASCR though its SciDAC program.
Read the Full Press Release>

July 11, 2008
ASCR Researcher Juan Meza Wins Second Award
Berkeley, CA -Dr. Juan C. Meza, Department Head and Senior Scientist for the High Performance Computing Research Department in the Computational Research Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and an ASCR researcher, was named recipient of a second prestigious award: the Blackwell-Tapia Prize.  Last month, Dr Meza won the SACNAS Distinguished Scientist Award.
Read the LBNL Press Release >

July 3, 2008
FastBit Bitmap Indexing Technology Receives R&D 100 Award
FastBit, an indexing technology software tool for data analyses or data mining, was selected by an independent judging panel and editors of R&D Magazine as one of the 100 most technologically significant products introduced into the marketplace over the past year.  FastBit, currently funded by ASCR though its SciDAC program, was developed by the Scientific Data Management (SDM) Research Group at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory.
Read more about FastBit >

June15, 2008
Energy’s ESnet supports collaborative research with on-demand, optical paths
The Energy Department has seen traffic on its Energy Sciences Network (ESnet), which links researchers at its major research labs and universities, increase tenfold every 47 months since 1990.  As a smaller number of larger, more sophisticated instruments are built, collaboration communities are growing and sharing more data.
Read More>

June 13, 2006
Juan Meza to Receive 2008 SACNAS Distinguished Scientist Award
WASHINGTON, D.C. - Juan Meza, head of CRD's High Performance Computing Research Department at LBNL, has been named recipient of the 2008 SACNAS Distinguished Scientist Award.  The award will be presented during the 2008 SACNAS National Conference in Salt Lake City, Utah, on Thursday, October 9.

The mission of SACNAS (Society for Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science) is to encourage Chicano/Latino and Native American students to pursue graduate education and obtain the advanced degrees necessary for science research, leadership, and teaching careers at all levels.  The organization is celebrating its 35th anniversary this year.
For more information about SACNAS, see the following link>

May 15, 2008
Jaguar Upgrade Brings Oak Ridge National Laboratory Closer to Petascale Computing
Oak Ridge, Tennessee - The Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility recently completed an upgrade to its Jaguar system, a Cray XT4 supercomputer.  It now uses more than 31,000 processing cores to deliver up to 263 trillion calculations a second (or 263 teraflops).  The upgrade, which doubles the system's performance, brings Oak Ridge National Laboratory closer to petascale computing and increases Jaguar's ability to deliver advances in climate studies, energy research and a wide range of sciences.
Read the ORNL Press Release

May 13, 2008
2009 INCITE CALL FOR PROPOSALS
WASHINGTON, D.C. -The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced today it is accepting proposals for a program to support high-impact scientific advances through the use of some of the world’s most powerful supercomputers at four of DOE’s national laboratories.  Through the Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program, DOE’s Office of Science plans to award approximately 680 million supercomputer processor-hours at its laboratories in Berkeley, CA; Chicago, IL; Oak Ridge, TN; and Richland, WA for large-scale, computationally-intensive science projects in 2009.
Read the Full Press Release>

May 8, 2008
ASCR's NERSC Supercomputer Takes Humanities Scholars Into the 21st Century
WASHINGTON, D.C. -The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Office of Science in the United States Department of Energy (DOE) are working together to provide humanities scholars with access to DOE supercomputers.  These grants provide computer time on DOE machines at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, as well as training and support to enable scholars to take full advantage of those resources.  Interested scholars will apply directly to NERSC, and hours will be awarded under the terms of the DOE's Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program.  The INCITE program was conceived specifically to seek out computationally intensive, large-scale research projects with the potential to significantly advance key areas in science and engineering.  With this partnership with NEH, the hope is that comparable research projects in the humanities will be able to take advantage of high performance computing resources.
Read The Chronicle of Higher Education Article>                 |                 Link to the NEH Web Page>

February, 2008
Vern Paxson Honored for Research Characterizing
the Internet
BERKELEY, Calif - Vern Paxson, long-time ASCR researcher, has been awarded the Association for Computing Machinery’s Grace Murray Hopper Award for his work in measuring and characterizing the Internet. The award, presented annually to the outstanding young computer professional of the year, is selected on the basis of a single recent major technical or service contribution. The candidate must have been 35 years of age or less when the qualifying contribution was made.  The Grace Murray Hopper Award includes a $35,000 prize, with financial support provided by Google.
Link to the LBNL Press Release>

February, 2008
ASCR Funded, LBNL Mathematician James Sethian Elected to National Academy of Engineering
BERKELEY, CA - James Sethian, and ASCR funded researcher who is head of the Mathematics Group at the DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a professor of mathematics at the University of California at Berkeley, has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering.  A researcher at LBNL since 1982, Sethian was honored “for the development of efficient methods of tracking moving interfaces.” Sethian’s research has led to the development of “level set methods” – numerical techniques that can follow the evolution of interfaces, as well as a host of other techniques to track interfaces in various settings.  The techniques have a wide range of applications, including problems in fluid mechanics, combustion, manufacturing of computer chips, computer animation, image processing, robotic navigation, the structure of snowflakes, and the shape of soap bubbles.  In addition to his own research, Sethian has helped educate more than 40 graduate students who have been members of the Mathematics Group.
Read the Full LBNL Press Release>

January 17, 2008
DOE Awards 265 Million Hours of Supercomputing Time to Advance Leading Scientific Research Projects
WASHINGTON, D.C. - The U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Office of Science today announced that 265 million processor-hours were awarded to 55 scientific projects, the largest amount of supercomputing resource awards donated in the Department's history and three times that of last year's award. The projects-with applications from aeronautics to astrophysics, and from climate change to combustion research-were chosen based on their potential breakthroughs in the science and engineering research and their suitability of the project for using supercomputers. These awards will allow cutting-edge research to be carried out in weeks or months, rather than years or decades, giving scientists access to some of the world's most powerful supercomputers at DOE national laboratories.
Read the Full Press Release>

October 19, 2007
DOE National Laboratory Research Projects Win 31 R&D Awards for 2007
WASHINGTON, DC - The U.S. Department of Energy’s Under Secretary for Science Raymond L. Orbach today lauded researchers from ten of the Department of Energy’s world-class national laboratories that were awarded 31 of the world’s top 100 scientific and technological innovations in 2007, as judged by R&D Magazine.  The awards are presented annually in recognition of the most outstanding technology developments with commercial potential.   18 of the awards won by DOE lab researchers were shared with researchers from universities and businesses.  R&D Magazine presented the awards at its 45th Annual R&D Awards Ceremony in Chicago.  
Read the Entire Press Release>

October 11, 2007
DOE Office of Science Publishes Update of Landmark Plan: "Facilities for the Future of Science: A Twenty-Year Outlook
WASHINGTON, DC - The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science today released a comprehensive update of its landmark 2003 publication, Facilities for the Future of Science: A Twenty-Year Outlook, that shows the agency has made “significant progress” in deploying the scientific facilities and instruments that the United States needs to capture world scientific leadership, extend the frontiers of science and support the Department’s missions.
Read the Entire Press Release>

June 27, 2007
ASCR Leadership Computer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory Ranked Top Open System
The new Top500 Supercomputing Site List was released June 27 at the 2007 International Supercomputing Conference, held in Dresden, Germany.  This list ranks the Cray XT4 Leadership Computing system at Oak Ridge at number two overall - the second fastest computer in the world - behind a Department of Energy classified system, the ASC IBM Blue Gene L at Lawrence Livermore National Lab. This makes the ASCR leadership computer at Oak Ridge, dubbed "Jaguar", the fastest computer in the world for open science.
Read the Press Release>

June 26, 2007
Inaugural IBM Blue Gene/P system to expand Argonne Leadership Computing Facility
DOE's Office of Science, Argonne National Laboratory and IBM announced that IBM will soon ship its first external Blue Gene/P system to ASCR's Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF).   Read the Press Release>

May 30, 2007
Next-Generation Network for DOE Science Takes Shape
The first segment in DOE's next-generation Energy Sciences Network (ESnet4) is now in production, providing significantly upgraded networking services to thousands of scientific researchers across the country.  The first segment connects the Washington, D.C. area to New York and Chicago through a partnership between Internet2 and ESnet that was announced in August, 2006.  Once completed, ESnet4 will be the most advanced and reliable, high capacity nationwide network supporting scientific research efforts of the DOE research community.  The ESnet program is managed as part of ASCR's Facilities Division and provides reliable, high-bandwidth connectivity to scientists at national labs and universities around the country and their collaborators around the world.
read more>

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