Science News
NERSC Global Filesystem Played a Key Role in Discovery of the Last Neutrino Mixing Angle
Discovery of the last neutrino mixing angle was announced in March 2012, just a few months after the Daya Bay Neutrino Experiment’s first detectors went online in southeast China. But that result might not have been available so quickly without the NERSC Global Filesystem (NGF) infrastructure, which allowed staff at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) NERSC to rapidly scale up disk and node resources to accommodate the surprisingly large influx of data. Read More »
A Massive Stellar Burst, Before the Supernova
An automated supernova hunt is shedding new light on the death sequence of massive stars—specifically, the kind that self-destruct in Type IIn supernova explosions. Read More »
NERSC Supercomputers Help Explain the Last Big Freeze
About 13,000 years ago, a catastrophic injection of freshwater into the North Atlantic “conveyor” triggered a major cold spell. But, how did the freshwater get there? With help from NERSC, two researchers may have finally solved this mystery. Read More »
NERSC Contributes to Smithsonian Magazine's Surprising Scientific Milestones of 2012
Using NERSC supercomputers, MIT researchers came up with a new approach for desalinating sea water using sheets of graphene, a one-atom-thick form of the element carbon. Smithsonian Magazine named this result the fifth "Surprising Scientific Milestone of 2012. Read More »
NERSC Contributes to Science Magazine's Breakthroughs of the Year
Of the top 10 finalists for Science mag's 2012 "Breakthrough of the Year," NERSC provided critical computing and archival support to two accomplishments. Read More »
NERSC Helps Develop Next-Gen Batteries
As part of DOE's new Batteries and Energy Storage Hub, NERSC resources will be used to predict the properties of electrolytes. When JCESR is up and running, collaborators will be able to combine these results with the existing Materials Project database to get a complete scope of battery components. Read More »
Modeling Feat Sheds Light on Protein Channel's Function
Using supercomputers at NERSC, chemists have simulated the biological function of the Sec translocon, which allows specific proteins to pass through membranes. The feat required bridging timescales from the realm of nanoseconds up to full minutes, exceeding earlier simulation efforts by more than 6 orders of magnitude. Read More »
The Path a Proton Takes Through a Fuel Cell Membrane
Experts believe that fuel cells may someday serve as clean energy conversion devices for transportation and other applications, but there are still some design issues that engineers need to sort out before this can happen. One challenge is to develop an inexpensive and robust polymer membrane that effectively conducts protons. In a step toward achieving that goal, researchers are running computer simulations at NERSC to understand how protons move through different polymer membranes. Read More »
Supernovae of the Same Brightness, Cut From Vastly Different Cosmic Cloth
Palomar Transient Factory team presented the first-ever direct observations of a Type 1a supernova progenitor system. Astronomers have collected evidence indicating that the system, called PTF 11kx, contains a red giant star. They also show that the system previously underwent at least one much smaller nova eruption before it ended its life in a destructive supernova. The event was initially detected by the PTF Real-Time Detection pipeline at NERSC. Read More »
Haverford College Researchers Create Carbon Dioxide-Separating Polymer
Using supercomputers at NERSC, researchers from Haverford College have come up with a new type of two-dimensional polymer, PG-ES1, which allows, in theory, for highly efficient separation of carbon dioxide from the exhausts of power plants. Read More »
New Computer Model Pinpoints Prime Materials for Carbon Capture
With help from NERSC's Petascale Initiative and DIRAC, researchers developed computer model to screen solid materials for cost-effectively capturing carbon emissions from fossil fuel-burning power plants. The new model shows that the parasitic energy costs of carbon capture could be reduced by 30 percent with the use of more efficient materials. Read More »
A new approach to water desalination
MIT researchers found that graphene sheets with precisely controlled pores have potential to purify water more efficiently than existing methods. Read More »
Sifting Through a Trillion Electrons
Astrophysicists using NERSC's Hopper system generated a 3D trillion-particle magnetic reconnection dataset, where each time-step amounted to a massive 32 terabyte file. With specialized tools developed by Berkeley Lab researchers, the scientists queried the dataset in 3 seconds and visualized it. This is the first-time a dataset of this magnitude has been queried and visualized so quickly. Read More »
Scientists Help Define the Healthy Human Microbiome
The human microbiome’s exact function, good and bad, is poorly understood. But, that could all change now that the normal microbial make-up of healthy humans has been mapped for the first time. Read More »
Using NERSC Systems, Physicists Close In on a Rare-Particle Decay Process
With help from supercomputers at NERSC, the Enriched Xenon Observatory experiment (EXO-200) has placed the most stringent constraints yet on the nature of a process called neutrinoless double beta decay. In doing so, the physicists have narrowed down the range of possible masses for the neutrino. Read More »
Learning From Photosynthesis to Create Electricity
Inspired by plants, scientists have created a light-harvesting material that can turn sunlight into chemical energy. However, creating a stable form of the material for large-scale usage has proved difficult. Read More »
Turning Water into Hydrogen Fuel
To do its job, the popular catalyst titanium dioxide often needs an even layer of hydroxyl groups across its surface; thanks to a new method by scientists at PNNL, the catalyst is now getting it. Read More »
New Accelerator Will Study Steps on the Path to Fusion Power
The Neutralized Drift Compression Experiment, NDCX-II has recently marked successful completion. Designed with the aid of computer simulations executed at NERSC, the accelerator was created to study warm dense matter, an important research field in itself and particularly relevant to nuclear fusion. NDCX-II will test a variety of technologies in preparation for a new generation of power plants on Earth that will mimic the engines of the stars. Read More »
Floating Robots Track Water Flow, Stream Data via Smartphones
To understand how water flows through the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, 100 mobile sensors were placed into the Sacramento River on May 9 to make critical measurements every few seconds. Once collected, this data is transmitted to NERSC for assimilation and analysis. Read More »
New Computer Codes Unlock the Secrets of Cleaner Burning Coal
Researchers supported by the Department of Energy are investigating relatively "clean" methods for extracting energy from coal—like gasification. Using NERSC systems, a scientist from the University of Utah has developed tools to model and validate the complex processes of coal gasification Read More »
Researchers Discover a New Kind of Neutrino Transformation
Some unprecedentedly precise measurements from the Daya Bay Neutrino Experiment are revealing how electron antineutrinos “oscillate” into different flavors as they travel. This finding may eventually solve the riddle of why there is far more ordinary matter than antimatter in the universe today. Read More »
A Roadmap for Engineering Piezoelectricity in Graphene
With the help of supercomputers at the Department of Energy’s NERSC, researchers at Stanford University have uncovered yet another hidden talent of graphene—with a little chemical doping, it can be transformed into a controllable piezoelectric material. This discovery could lead to a wide variety of nanoscale devices from electronics and photonics to chemical sensing and high frequency acoustics. Read More »
New Mathematical Method Reveals Where Genes Switch On or Off
Developmental biologists using computing resources at NERSC, have taken a new mathematical method used in signal processing and applied it to biochemistry, using it to reveal the atomic-level details of protein–DNA interactions with unprecedented accuracy. They hope this method, called “compressed sensing,” will speed up research into where genes are turned on and off, and they expect it to have applications in many other scientific domains as well. Read More »
The Great Gas Hydrate Escape
For some time, researchers have explored flammable ice for low-carbon or alternative fuel or as a place to store carbon dioxide. Now, a computer analysis of the ice and gas compound, known as a gas hydrate, reveals key details of its structure. This work could enlighten alternative fuel production and carbon dioxide storage. Read More »
Bubbles Help Break Energy Storage Record for Lithium Air-Batteries
Using supercomputers at NERSC and microscopy, a team of researchers from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and Princeton University recently built a novel graphene membrane that could produce a lithium-air batter with the highest-energy capacity to date. Read More »
Calculating What’s in the Universe from the Biggest Color 3-D Map
Using NERSC systems, Berkeley Lab scientists and their Sloan Digital Sky Survey colleagues have produced the biggest 3D color map of the universe ever. The team also achieved the most accurate calculation yet of how matter clumps together – from a time when the universe was only half its present age until now. Read More »
Closest Type Ia Supernova in Decades Solves a Cosmic Mystery
Even as the "supernova of a generation" came into view in backyards across the northern hemisphere last August, physicists and astronomers who had caught its earliest moments were developing a surprising and much clearer picture of what happens during a titanic Type Ia explosion. Now they have announced the closest, most detailed look ever at one of the universe’s brightest “standard candles,” the celestial mileposts that led to the discovery of dark energy. Read More »
A Better Way to ID Extreme Weather Events in Climate Models
A team of researchers that includes Berkeley Lab scientists are using state-of-the-art methods in data mining and high-performance computing to quantify extreme weather phenomena in the very large datasets generated by today’s climate models. Their work will help scientists predict how climate change impact the frequency of extreme weather events. Read More »
Supercomputers Take a Cue From Microwave Ovens
To build the break-through supercomputers that climate researchers need to model clouds, scientists are taking a cue from consumer electronics where everything from chips to batteries to software is optimized to the device’s application. Read More »
Turning Grass into Gas for Less
Pull up to the pump these days and chances are your gas will be laced with ethanol, a biofuel made from corn. Corn-ethanol is relatively easy to make, but with growing populations and shrinking farmland, there will never be enough of the starchy food crop to both feed and fuel the world. That’s why researchers are working on “grassoline,” liquid biofuels made from hardy, high yielding, non-food crops, like switchgrass. But what makes these crops indigestible to humans also makes them… Read More »
A Better Lithium-ion Battery on the Way
Lithium-ion batteries are everywhere, in smart phones, laptops, an array of other consumer electronics, and the newest electric cars. Good as they are, they could be much better, especially when it comes to lowering the cost and extending the range of electric cars. To do that, batteries need to store a lot more energy. A team of scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has designed a new kind of anode — a critical… Read More »
Supernova Caught in the Act
A supernova discovered yesterday is closer to Earth—approximately 21 million light-years away—than any other of its kind in a generation. Astronomers believe they caught the supernova within hours of its explosion, a rare feat made possible by a specialized survey telescope and state-of-the-art computational tools. The discovery of such a supernova so early and so close has energized the astronomical community as they are scrambling to observe it with as many telescopes as possible,… Read More »
Small Particles, Big Impact
High-resolution simulation for Mexico City (top), shows a more detailed and accurate picture of aerosol pollution compared to representations of a global climate model (bottom). The deep red to light green colors represent concentrations of aerosol pollution with red being highest, light green lowest. Using systems at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), atmospheric scientists at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) have found that small scale effects… Read More »
Magellan Tackles Mysterious Proton Spin
The STAR experiment's detector records the decay of subatomic smash-ups to uncover how the fundamental building blocks of the universe work. What makes a proton spin? That is one of the biggest mysteries in physics. Although researchers do not fully understand the underlying physics of this phenomenon, they do know that it contributes to the stability of the universe, magnetic interactions, and are a vital component of technologies like Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) machines that are used… Read More »
At Solar System's Edge, There be...Bubbles?
This animated computer simulation shows how magnetic bubbles form at the edge of our solar system. It was created on NERSC's "Franklin" supercomputer using 8,192 processor cores simultaneously running for 20 hours. (Credit: James F. Drake) NASA's Voyager probes have reached the end of our solar system where they've found neither giants nor dragons, but something nearly as surprising—a turbulent froth of magnetic bubbles. Using new computer models to analyze Voyager data, scientists computing… Read More »
Proton Dripping Tests a Basic Force of Nature
Despite its prevalence in nature, researchers are still searching for the precise laws that govern the strong force--the essential "glue" that holds atomic nuclei together to form atoms. However, the recent discovery of an extremely exotic, short-lived nucleus called fluorine-14 in laboratory experiments may indicate that scientists are gaining a better grasp of these rules. Read More »
LED Lighting Comes out of the Dark
New findings from simulations carried out at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) have unearthed the cause of a problem that limits the use of ultra-efficient, light-emitting diodes in general lighting, researchers say. Read More »
Heaviest Antimatter Particle Detected with NERSC Help
Eighteen examples of the heaviest antiparticle ever found, the nucleus of antihelium-4, have been made in the STAR experiment at RHIC, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory. The finding wasn’t unexpected, but it is a milestone for scientists exploring a fundamental puzzle of physics: Why is there any matter at all? Read More »
Boosting the Next Wave of Accelerators
Generating computer models of 'tabletop accelerators' has proven difficult, slow, and costly. To solve this problem, a team of scientists computing at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) has perfected a new method that generates models anywhere from 10,000 to a million times faster than before. Read More »
'Dark' Milky Way Satellite Galaxy Uncovered
Sukanya Chakrabarti has developed a mathematical method uncover “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, approximately 300,000 light-years from the galactic center. Read More »
Cyclones Linked to Pliocene Warming
Scientists searching for clues to Earth’s future climate are turning to its dim past, the Pliocene epoch. Using computer simulations, researchers are unraveling a mystery that has bedeviled climatologists for years: Why was the Pliocene – under conditions similar to today – so much hotter? Recent work suggests that tropical cyclones (also called hurricanes or typhoons) may have played a crucial role. Read More »
Modeling the Bonds of Iron and Water
Using supercomputers at the Department of Energy's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), scientists have successfully modeled the atomic interactions between a high spin ferric iron ion and 64 water molecules for the first time. Researchers say this unprecedentedly accurate model will offer valuable insights into key reactions involved in carbon sequestration and other environmental remediation projects. Read More »
A Goldilocks Catalyst
Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil fuel combustion are major contributors to global warming. Since CO2 comes from fuel, why can't we recycle it back into fuel rather than releasing it into the atmosphere? Read More »
Clearer Picture of Carbon Sequestration
Berkeley Lab scientists are using computer simulations run at NERSC to help evaluate one method for keeping carbon dioxide emitted by fossil fueled power plants out of the atmosphere: Geologic sequestration in salty water reservoirs deep underground. Researchers have created the most detailed models yet of the mixing processes that occur at the interface of sequestered carbon dioxide (CO 2) and brine in geologic sequestration projects.These simulations—including the first three-dimensional ones—will help scientists better predict the success of this kind of project. Read More »
Climate Time-Machine
An international team of climatologists have created a comprehensive reanalysis of all global weather events from 1871 to the present day with help from NERSC. Over the last four years, the project's leader, Gil Compo, has put to use over 20 million processing hours at NERSC to help make it happen. Read More »
Rechargeable Heat Battery's Secret Revealed
Researchers computing at NERSC have shown that a fulvalene diruthenium molecule undergoes a structural transformation when it absorbs sunlight, putting the molecule into a higher-energy or charged state where it can remain stable indefinitely. Then, triggered by a small addition of heat or a catalyst, it snaps back to its original shape, releasing heat in the process. Read More »
Berkeley and Princeton Scientists Watch Stars Explode in 3D
Researchers from Princeton University and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have found a new way to make computer simulations of supernovae exploding in three dimensions. The new simulations are based on the idea that the collapsing star itself is not sphere-like, but distinctly asymmetrical and affected by a host of instabilities in the volatile mix surrounding its core. Read More »
NERSC Helps Shed Light on the Nature of Antimatter
Using the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center's (NERSC) Parallel Distributed Systems Facility (PDSF) and the Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), physicists have detected and confirmed the first-ever antimatter hypernucleus, called "antihypertriton." Translated, the newly detected "antihypertriton" means a nucleus of antihydrogen containing one antiproton and one antineutron—plus one heavy relative of the antineutron, an antilambda hyperon. Most of the objects in the cosmos today consists of matter, comprised of "normal" particles like positively charged protons and negatively charged electrons. Read More »
Dancing in the Dark
Berkeley Lab scientists have applied x-ray absorption spectroscopy to study a model protein, triglycine – a short chain of three molecules of the simplest amino acid, glycine. By simulating this molecule’s x-ray absorption spectrum the team has show how its chain kinks and straightens in response to ions in solution. Read More »
Taking the 'Large' out of Large Hadron Collider
Particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN are the big rock stars of high-energy physics—really big. The LHC cost nearly USD$10 billion to build and its largest particle racetrack (27 km in circumference) stretches across a national border. However, a recent breakthrough in computer modeling may help hasten the day when accelerators thousands of times more powerful can be built in a fraction of the space—and for significantly less money. Read More »
California Is the Primary U.S. Stop for LHC's ALICE Data
For approximately one month a year, the nuclei of lead atoms traveling near the speed of light will collide in the Large Hadron Collider's (LHC) ALICE experiment, generating a fireball about 100,000 times hotter than the core of our Sun. At these temperatures protons and neutrons dissolve into a "particle soup" of quarks and gluons, known as the quark-gluon plasma—a state of matter that first occurred in nature at the birth of our Universe almost 14 billion years ago, a few millionths of a second after the Big Bang. By watching this "soup" cool, physicists hope to better understand the nature of matter, which makes up everything from galaxies to humans. Read More »
Simulations Show That "Sweaty" Flowers Cool the World
The world is a cooler, wetter place because of transpiring flowers, say University of Chicago researchers who ran more than a million lines of code on the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center's (NERSC's) IBM Power5 "Bassi" system last year. They found that this effect is especially pronounced in the Amazon basin, where 80 percent of ever-wet rainforest area would not exist without flowering plants. These findings were published online on June 16, 2010 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Read More »
Computing Enables New Insights into Generating Power Like the Sun
If humans could harness nuclear fusion, the process that powers stars like our sun, the world could have an inexhaustible energy source. But researchers still do not understand the behavior of plasmas well enough to effectively confine them to generate a sustainable flow of energy. NERSC simulations show that that instabilities at the plasma edge can can cause multiple pulses of instability, which damage plasma containment chambers. Read More »
Simulations Reveal Earth's Silica Is Predominantly Superficial
Silica is one of the most common minerals on Earth. Not only does it make up two-thirds of our planet's crust, it is also used to create a variety of materials from glass to ceramics, computer chips and fiber optic cables. Yet new quantum mechanics results generated by a team of physicists computing at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) show that this mineral only populates our planet superficially—in other words, silica is relatively uncommon deep within the Earth. Read More »
Bringing Clouds into Focus
David Randall, principal investigator for the "Global Cloud Modeling" project that computes at NERSC, is working to clear up uncertainty in global climate models caused by differing methods of accounting for the effects of clouds. He is developing and testing a new kind of global climate model, called a global cloud resolving model (GCRM)—a model that's designed to take advantage of the extreme-scale computers expected in the near future. Read More »
NERSC Users Find That Nanodroplets of Water Can Manipulate Graphene
Chemists from the University of Illinois at Chicago using the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center's (NERSC) Cray XT4 supercomputer, called Franklin have found that nanodroplets of water can be used to shape graphene into complex capsules, sandwiches, knots, and rings to serve as the building blocks of nanodevices with unique mechanical, electrical, and optical properties. Read More »
Brace for Impact
While the fireworks at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) transfix the world, theorists are quietly doing some computational heavy lifting to help understand what these particle smash-ups might reveal about the fundamental mystery of existence: Why is there anything at all? The Standard Model of particle physics can't explain why there exists more matter than antimatter in the universe. At the LHC and other colliders, scientists sift the debris of high-energy particle collisions searching for clues to physics that lie beyond our current understanding. Read More »
NERSC Helps Locate Jupiter's Missing Neon
It's raining helium on Jupiter—and as these droplets fall towards the planet's deeper interior, they are bringing neon down with them. This new result, published in the March 26 issue of Physical Review Letters, solves a 15-year-old mystery that was initiated on December 7, 1995, when NASA's Galileo probe plunged into Jupiter's atmosphere and found only one-ninth the amount of neon that should have been there based on measurements of the Sun's composition. The authors, Burkhard Militzer and Hugh Wilson of the University of California, Berkeley, were able to answer this decade-old question with some supercomputing help from the Department of Energy's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC). Read More »
Baby Brutes
Astronomers have in recent years been surprised to find hulking brutes among the baby galaxies of the early Universe. Studded with bright, giant clumps of rapidly forming stars, these big galaxies hail from a time when the cosmos was less than 4 billion years old, yet each contains about the mass of a modern Milky Way, which took 10 billion years to form. Once considered oddities, these galaxies are now thought to be the engines that drove the Universe's most active period of star formation. It remains a mystery, however, how such massive galaxies came to be so quickly and what has happened to them in our modern Universe. Read More »
A Computational Science Approach for Analyzing Culture
Just as photography revolutionized the study of art by allowing millions of people all over the world to scrutinize sculptures and paintings outside of museums, researchers from the Software Studies Initiative at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) believe that a new paradigm called cultural analytics will drastically change the study of culture by allowing people to quantify evolving trends across time and countries. Read More »
Mismatched alloys are a good match for thermoelectrics
Employing some of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have shown that mismatched alloys are a good match for the future development of high performance thermoelectric devices. Thermoelectrics hold enormous potential for green energy production because of their ability to convert heat into electricity. Computations performed on “Franklin,” a Cray XT4 massively parallel processing system operated by the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), showed that the introduction of oxygen impurities into a unique class of semiconductors known as highly mismatched alloys (HMAs) can substantially enhance the thermoelectric performance of these materials without the customary degradation in electric conductivity. Read More »
NERSC Helps Researchers Discover a Potential On-Off Switch for Nanoelectronics
Researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's (Berkeley Lab) Molecular Foundry and Columbia University found that electrical resistance through a molecular junction—a nanometer scale circuit element consisting of a single molecule contacted with gold wires—can be turned on and off by simply pushing and pulling the junction. Experts believe that this newly demonstrated molecular-scale control could be leveraged for future nanoscale electronic devices. Read More »
NERSC Continues Tradition of Cosmic Microwave Background Data Analysis with the Planck Cluster
More than 95 percent of our universe is made up of mysteriously "dark" materials—approximately 22 percent of it is comprised of invisible dark matter, while another 73 percent is posited to be dark energy, the force that is accelerating universal expansion. Armed with a new spacecraft called Planck and supercomputers at the Department of Energy's (DOE) National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), astronomers around the world hope to make tremendous strides toward illuminating the nature and origins of these mystifying materials by creating high-resolution maps of extremely subtle variations in the temperature and polarization of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), which is leftover light from the Big Bang that permeates the universe. Read More »
It's Not Too Late to Change Global Warming's Course
The threat of global warming can still be greatly diminished if nations cut emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases by 70 percent this century, according to a study led by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). While global temperatures would rise, the most dangerous potential aspects of climate change, including massive losses of Arctic sea ice and permafrost and significant sea level rise, could be partially avoided. Read More »
Lasers without Mirrors, Designed by Supercomputer
Sometimes it takes a big machine to understand the tiniest details. That’s the case with free electron lasers (FELs). FELs have the potential to address a host of research challenges in physics, chemistry and material and biological sciences. Read More »
NERSC Contributes to EMGeo Mapping Software for Finding Hidden Oil and Gas Reserves
As the world's demand for energy increases, billions of dollars are dedicated to the search for deep-water hydrocarbon reservoirs each year. Although seismic imaging methods have long been used to collect valuable information on geological structures bearing hydrocarbon deposits, they have not proven effective in discriminating different types of reservoir fluids, such as brines, oil, and gas. Because of this inability to discriminate, over time huge financial losses result from drilling dry holes—up to 100 million dollars per each unsuccessful drilling. Meanwhile significant hydrocarbon reservoirs remain undiscovered. Read More »
NERSC Helps Discover Cosmic Transients
An innovative new sky survey, called the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF), will utilize the unique tools and services offered by the Department of Energy's (DOE) National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (Berkeley Lab) to expose relatively rare and fleeting cosmic events, like supernovae and gamma ray bursts. Read More »
Visualizing the Future of Scientific Discovery
As computational scientists are confronted with increasingly massive datasets from supercomputing simulations and experiments, one of the biggest challenges is having the right tools to gain scientific insight from the data. A team of Department of Energy (DOE) researchers recently ran a series of experiments to determine whether VisIt, a leading scientific visualization application, is up to the challenge. Running on some of the world's most powerful supercomputers, VisIt achieved… Read More »
NERSC and CRD Help Decipher Science from Compact Accelerator Simulations
Scientists use many different tools to understand the universe. While telescopes offer valuable insights about interactions between stars, planets and galaxies; particle accelerators give researchers a better understanding of the basic particles that make up these structures, as well as the fields and forces that hold them together. The bigger the accelerator, the more energy subatomic particles can pick up, which leads to higher-intensity impacts that expose ever more basic particles, fields and forces. However, bigger is also costlier, and scientists worry that accelerators built with today's technology may simply be unaffordable. Read More »
Deep Sky Project Provides a Portal into Data Universe
Every night approximately 3,000 astronomical files flow to the National Energy Research Scientific Computing (NERSC) Center from automated sky scanning systems all over the world for archiving. After a decade of collecting, the center currently holds over 8 million images, making this one of the largest troves of ground-based celestial images available. Now, a multidisciplinary team of astronomers, computer scientists, and engineers from NERSC are collaborating to develop a user-friendly database system and interface to instantly serve up high-resolution cosmic reference images to astronomers around the globe. Read More »
Humanities and High Performance Computers Connect at NERSC
High performance computing and the humanities are finally connecting — with a little matchmaking help from the Department of Energy (DOE) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Both organizations have teamed up to create the Humanities High Performance Computing Program, a one-of-a-kind initiative that gives humanities researchers access to some of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. Read More »
A Rising Tide of Cosmic Data
In 1998 the balloon-borne BOOMERANG and MAXIMA experiments made what were then the highest-resolution measurements of minute variations in the temperature of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB). Their high resolution was achieved by scanning small patches of the sky to gather unprecedented volumes of data. The analysis of these datasets presented a significant computational challenge – they were the first CMB datasets to require supercomputing resources. Read More »
IMPACTS: On the Threshold of Abrupt Climate Changes
Abrupt climate change is a potential menace that hasn’t received much attention. That’s about to change. Through its Climate Change Prediction Program, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Biological and Environmental Research (OBER) recently launched IMPACTS – Investigation of the Magnitudes and Probabilities of Abrupt Climate Transitions – a program led by William Collins of Berkeley Lab’s Earth Sciences Division (ESD) that brings together six national laboratories to attack the problem of abrupt climate change, or ACC. Read More »
Visualizing the unseen forces of turbulence
Its invisible eddies and vortexes can dramatically alter the flight of everything from golf balls to hypersonic jets. Grasping the vast power of turbulence could help researchers design better weather forecasts, more efficient cars, quieter helicopters and even faster ships that “float” through the high seas on a cushion of air. Read More »
A Computer for the Clouds
A proposed supercomputer would do just one job--model global climate--but consume far less electricity than a general-purpose machine. Read More »
Code Booster: Award-winning research on code optimization explores multicore computing
At the 2008 IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS) held in Miami, the award for Best Paper in the “applications” category went to a research paper exploring ways to make a popular scientific analysis code run smoothly on different types of multicore computers. Read More »
A Supercomputer Takes Humanities Scholars Into the 21st Century
The phrase "one million" in grant announcements tends to be eye-catching because it is usually linked to the word "dollars." But late Monday afternoon, when officials at the National Endowment for the Humanities used that figure in describing a new grants program, they were not talking about money. "We are offering one million hours of high-performance computing," said Brett Bobley, director of the endowment's new Office of Digital Humanities.... Read More »
Ceramic, Heal Thyself
A new computer simulation has revealed a self-healing behavior in a common ceramic that may lead to development of radiation-resistant materials for nuclear power plants and waste storage. DOE's Office of Basic Energy Sciences funded the research, which was performed on massively parallel supercomputers in the William R. Wiley Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL) at PNNL, and the National Energy Research Scientific Computer Center at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Read More »
Scientists Compute Death Throes of White Dwarf Star in 3D
University of Chicago scientists demonstrated how to incinerate a white dwarf star in unprecedented detail at the “Paths to Exploding Stars” conference on March 22, 2007, in Santa Barbara, Calif. White dwarf stars pack one and a half times the mass of the sun into an object the size of Earth. When they burn out, the ensuing explosion produces a type of supernova that astrophysicists believe manufactures most of the iron in the universe. But these type Ia supernovas, as they are called, may also help illuminate the mystery of dark energy, an unknown force that dominates the universe. Read More »
A Walk along an Interface Yields Its Mobility
In this week's issue of Science (volume 314, page 632), researchers at the Colorado School of Mines and Northeastern University report a novel computational methodology aimed at quantifying the kinetics of interfaces in diverse material systems. The paper, titled "Interface Mobility from Interface Random Walk," addresses computational issues in extracting interface kinetic parameters under experimentally relevant conditions. Read More »
NERSC Supercomputers to Analyze Hurricane Coastal Surges, Help Plan Rebuilding in Louisiana, Gulf Coast
The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science has allocated 400,000 processor hours of supercomputing time at its National Energy Research Scientific Computing (NERSC) Center to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers New Orleans District to run a series of simulations of hurricane protection projects within coastal Louisiana. Read More »
Groundbreaking Combustion Research by LBNL Featured on Cover of Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences
Computational and combustion scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have earned national recognition in the July 19, 2005 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences with their cover article about unparalleled computer simulations of turbulent flames. Read More »
Laser Wakefield Acceleration: Channeling the Best Beams Ever
Researchers at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have taken a giant step toward realizing the promise of laser wakefield acceleration, by guiding and controlling extremely intense laser beams over greater distances than ever before to produce high-quality, energetic electron beams. Read More »
Tuning the Nanoworld
Scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have found new ways of combining quantum dots and segmented nanorods into multiply branching forms and have applied new ways to calculate the electronic properties of these nanostructures, whose dimensions are measured in billionths of a meter. Read More »
Heidelberg Talk Tells How to "Fool the Masses"
David Bailey, chief technologist for the Computational Research and NERSC Center divisions, delivered a tongue-in-cheek yet still serious presentation here on June 25, reminding attendees at the 2004 International Supercomputer Conference that hype and exaggeration still loom large in the field. As an invited speaker, Bailey drew one of the largest and most enthusiastic audiences of the conference to his talk on "12 Ways to Fool the Masses." Read More »
NERSC Helps Nearby Supernova Factory Discover Supernovae at a Rate of 8 per Month
The Nearby Supernova Factory based at Berkeley Lab has discovered 34 supernovae during its first year of operation and 99 to date — the best performance ever for a "rookie" supernova search. This remarkable discovery rate of eight per month is made possible by a high-speed data link, custom data pipeline software, and NERSC's ability to store and process 50 gigabytes of data every night. Read More »
Improved Algorithm Speeds Up Fusion Code by a Factor of 5
Developers of the NIMROD code, which is used to simulate fusion reactor plasmas, collaborated with members of the SciDAC Terascale Optimal PDE Simulations Center to implement the SuperLU linear solver software within NIMROD. As a result, NIMROD runs four to five times faster for cutting-edge simulations of nonlinear macroscopic electromagnetic dynamics — with a corresponding increase in scientific productivity. Read More »
Scientists Find "Fingerprint" of Human Activities in Recent Tropopause Height Changes
A team of scientists, including Michael Wehner of LBNL's Computational Research Division, has determined that human-induced changes in ozone and well-mixed greenhouse gases are the primary drivers of recent changes in the height of the tropopause. The team is led by Ben Santer of LLNL and their work is described in a paper entitled, "Contributions of Anthropogenic and Natural Forcing to Recent Tropopause Height Changes," which appears in the July 25, 2003 edition of Science. Read More »
Simulation Computed at NERSC Matches Historic Gamma-Ray Burst
After three decades of scientific head-scratching, the origins of at least some gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are being revealed, thanks to a new generation of orbiting detectors, fast responses from ground-based robotic telescopes, and a new generation of computers and astrophysics software. Read More »
New Computational and Scientific Results at NERSC: Science-of-Scale Applications Achieve Significant Results and up to 68% of Peak Performance on 10 Tflop/s IBM SP (3-10-03)
Initial results from NERSC’s 10 teraflop/s IBM SP supercomputer, which became available for general use in early March 2003, show scientific applications running at up to 68% of the system’s theoretical peak speed, compared with the 5–10% of peak performance typical for scientific applications running on massively parallel or cluster architectures. Read More »
NERSC Helps Get the Physics out of KamLAND Data
The Standard Model of Particle Physics, which has successfully explained fundamental physics since the 1970s, predicts that neutrinos have no mass and come in three types or "flavors," electron, muon, and tau. But for the past four years, solar neutrino experiments at the Super-Kamiokande Observatory (Super-K) in Japan and the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) in Canada have offered compelling evidence that neutrinos do have nonzero mass and oscillate between the three flavors Read More »
NERSC Helps Climate Scientists Complete First Ever 1,000-Year Run of Nation's Leading Climate Change Modeling Application
Scientists from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) have just completed a 1,000-year run of a powerful new climate system model on a supercomputer at the U.S. Department of Energy's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Accurately predicting global climate change demands complex and comprehensive computer simulation codes, the fastest supercomputers available and the ability to run those simulations long enough to model century after century of the global climate. Read More »
Are the Digits of Pi Random?
David H. Bailey, chief technologist of the Department of Energy's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and his colleague Richard Crandall, director of the Center for Advanced Computation at Reed College, Portland, Oregon, have taken a major step toward answering the age-old question of whether the digits of pi and other math constants are "random." Their results are reported in the Summer 2001 issue of Experimental Mathematics. Read More »
A Lucky Catch: The Oldest, Most Distant Type Ia Supernova Confirmed by Supercomputer Analysis at NERSC
An exploding star dubbed SN 1997ff, caught once on purpose and twice by accident by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, is the oldest and most distant Type Ia supernova ever seen, according to a recent analysis by the Department of Energy's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Read More »
BOOMERANG Antarctic Balloon Flight Sees a Flat Universe
On April 26, 2000, the international BOOMERANG consortium led by Andrew Lange of the California Institute of Technology and Paolo de Bernardis of Università de Roma, "La Sapienza," announced results of the most detailed measurement yet made of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB). Read More »
An Algorithm for the Ages
Among the top 10 "Algorithms of the Century" announced in the January/February, 2000, issue of Computing in Science and Engineering magazine is the integer-relation algorithm dubbed PSLQ, discovered by mathematician and sculptor Helaman Ferguson of Maryland's Center for Computing Sciences, and implemented in practical computer software by David Bailey, chief technologist of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley… Read More »
Solved at Last: A Fundamental Problem of Quantum Physics
For over half a century, theorists have tried and failed to provide a complete solution to scattering in a quantum system of three charged particles, one of the most fundamental phenomena in atomic physics. Such interactions are everywhere; ionization by electron impact, for example, is responsible for the glow of fluorescent lights and for the ion beams that engrave silicon chips. Read More »
BOOMERanG Analysis Finds Flat Universe
Newly released data from the 1997 North American test flight of BOOMERanG, which mapped anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB) in a narrow strip of sky, show a pronounced peak in the CMB "power spectrum" at an angular scale of about one degree, strong evidence that the universe is flat. Analyzed at the Department of Energy's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the new… Read More »
New Biological Database Seeks Out Products of Alternative Gene Splicing
In its first half year of operation, a new database that identifies clusters of proteins arising from alternative gene splicing has received more than 35,000 requests from researchers in genetics and cell and developmental biology around the world. Read More »
NERSC and the Fate of the Universe
When the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) moved to Berkeley Lab in 1996, a computational science program was created to encourage collaborations between physical and computer scientists. The Supernova Cosmology Project's work was one of the first projects funded; it demonstrates how high-performance computing can accelerate scientific discovery. Read More »
