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CRD Researchers Part of Team Honored with Klaus Halbach Award
November 2, 2018
A group of Berkeley Lab computer scientists, engineers and mathematicians that included staff from the Computational Research Division (CRD) were recently honored with the 2018 Klaus Halbach Award for innovative instrumentation at the Advanced Light Source (ALS).
The award, which was presented in October during the ALS annual users meeting, is named for Klaus Halbach, a senior staff scientist at Berkeley Lab who pioneered the development of undulators using permanent magnets, and other innovations in accelerator physics. Even though he retired from the lab in 1991, he remained active in lab projects and student training until his death in 2000.
ALS Users’ Group Executive Committee member Ashley Head presents the 2018 Klaus Halbach award to the COSMIC ptychography team. From left: Ashley Head, David Shapiro, Rich Celestre, Lee Yang, Bjoern Enders, Susan James, Stefano Marchesini, Hari Krishnan, Kasra Nowrouzi, Young-Sang Yu.
The award-winning team, which included Harinarayan Krishnan and Stefano Marchesini of the CRD’s CAMERA project, was honored for “the development of the microscopy endstation at the COSMIC beamline, featuring an ultra-stable x-ray microscope, computational methods for data reconstruction, and a high-speed data acquisition system.” Other members of the collaboration were David Shapiro, Richard Celestre, Kasra Nowrouzi, Bjoern Enders, Young-Sang Yu and Lee Lisheng Yang of the ALS and members of the Science IT, Scientific Computing Group led by Gary Jung.
In addition to the instrumentation at the ALS, this work involved SHARP (scalable heterogeneous adaptive real-time ptychography), an algorithmic framework and computer software that enables the reconstruction of millions of phases of ptychographic image data per second that was developed at Berkeley Lab and rolled out in 2016. More recently, the researchers implemented a software/algorithmic pipeline that enables real-time streaming of ptychographic image data during a beamline experiment, providing throughput, compression and resolution as well as rapid feedback to the user while the experiment is still running.
“This collaboration between CRD mathematicians, computer scientists and engineers at the ALS resulted in this microscopy endstation being a leading-edge capability for researchers at the lab and, eventually, other light sources across the Department of Energy complex,” said David Brown, director of the CRD. “This award is well-deserved.”
About Berkeley Lab
Founded in 1931 on the belief that the biggest scientific challenges are best addressed by teams, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and its scientists have been recognized with 16 Nobel Prizes. Today, Berkeley Lab researchers develop sustainable energy and environmental solutions, create useful new materials, advance the frontiers of computing, and probe the mysteries of life, matter, and the universe. Scientists from around the world rely on the Lab’s facilities for their own discovery science. Berkeley Lab is a multiprogram national laboratory, managed by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.
DOE’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science.
