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Search Engine Speeds Past Competition

May 31, 2011

Berkeley Lab's open source FastBit can search massive databases 10 to 100 times faster than large commercial database software. Read More »

James Demmel Elected to National Academy of Sciences

May 3, 2011

James W. Demmel, a UCB professor and CRD researcher, is one of 72 new members elected to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). Read More »

Supercomputer Cracks "Impossible" Calculation

April 25, 2011

David Bailey Australian researchers have done the impossible—they’ve found the sixty-trillionth binary digit of Pi-squared! The calculation would have taken a single computer processor unit (CPU) 1,500 years to calculate, but scientists from IBM and the University of Newcastle managed to complete this work in just a few… Read More »

Performance Tuning of Scientific Applications

March 11, 2011

  David Bailey and Samuel Williams of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Computational Research Division (CRD) recently published a book called, Performance Tuning of Scientific Applications, which presents current research in performance analysis from some of the most notable experts in the… Read More »

Two Berkeley Lab Researchers Named 2011 Sloan Fellows

February 17, 2011

Two researchers from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Computational Research Division have been awarded the prestigious Sloan Research Fellowship, given annually by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to scientists, mathematicians and economists who are at an early stage of their research careers. The awardees will receive a $50,000 grant over the next two years to pursue any line of research they choose. The new fellows from Berkeley Lab are: Per-Olof Persson, CRD Mathematics Group… Read More »

A Clearer Picture of Carbon Sequestration

January 31, 2011

Fossil fuel-fired power plants, such as this coal-fired one, are major sources of CO2 emissions, the main culprit in manmade climate change. Despite progress in clean energy, Americans will continue to rely on fossil fuels for years to come. In fact, coal-, oil- and natural gas-fired power… Read More »

Berkeley Lab Team Receives NASA Public Service Group Achievement Award

June 11, 2010

Three scientists from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s (Berkeley Lab) Computational Cosmology Center (C3) are being honored with a NASA Public Service Group Award for developing the supercomputing infrastructure for the U.S. Planck Team’s data and analysis operations at the Department of Energy's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC). The award will be presented to current C3 members Julian Borrill, Christopher Cantalupo and Theodore Kisner, as well as… Read More »

Restoring Carbon Balance

February 10, 2010

CRD researchers received more than 18 million supercomputing hours through the 2010 Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program to conduct experiments and run simulations exploring the viability of carbon-neutral technologies, like nano solar cells and near-zero emission combustion devices. Read More »

Madly Mapping the Universe

February 3, 2010

It takes special software to map the universe from noisy data. Berkeley Lab scientists developed a code called MADmap to do just that for the cosmic microwave background, then posted it on the web for other interested sky mappers. Scientists probing the sky with the PACS instrument aboard the Herschel satellite have adapted MADmap to make spectacular images of the infrared universe. Read More »

Tradition of Cosmic Microwave Background Data Analysis Continues with Planck

October 30, 2009

One of Planck's first images is shown as a strip superimposed over a two-dimensional projection of the whole sky as seen in visible light. Image credit: ESA, LFI & HFI Consortia; background optical image: Axel Mellinger More than 95 percent of our universe is made up of mysteriously "dark" materials—approximately 22 percent of it is… Read More »

Berkeley Lab Checkpoint Restart Saves Big Problems

February 9, 2009

A combustion researcher may run hundreds of hours of simulations on a supercomputer in search of the most efficient fuel-air mixture for a flame. But if the system crashes, then all the data from the run might be lost and the researchers forced to start over The new version Berkeley Lab Checkpoint Restart (BCLR) software, released in January 2009, could mean that scientists running extensive calculations will be able to recover from such a crash – if they are running on a Linux cluster. This… Read More »

New Tools for Sharing Wealth of Data to Study Global Resources Issues

January 20, 2009

As they strive to develop effective strategies for guarding water supplies, protecting endangered species and curbing greenhouse gases, environmental scientists are turning to innovative cyber-infrastructures and data-mining tools developed by an ongoing collaboration between researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Microsoft Research, and the University of California, Berkeley. The Microsoft e-Science program is the primary funder of this project, which is one of numerous ventures… Read More »

Integrated Microbial Genomics Reaches Out to Include Human Microbial Communities

December 1, 2008

We live in a microbial world,” says Nikos Kyrpides of Berkeley Lab’s Genomics Division. “There are millions of organisms in one drop of water and even more in soil. Life on our planet cannot be sustained without the microbes.” However, only a tiny fraction of microbes live as independent species, and even fewer of these can be cultured in the laboratory. The vast majority of bacteria and other microorganisms exist only in the wild, and in complex communities. The collective genome… Read More »

LBNL Team Wins Special ACM Gordon Bell Prize for Algorithm Innovation

November 20, 2008

AUSTIN, Texas--A team of scientists from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) won a prestigious ACM Gordon Bell Prize for special achievement in high performance computing for their  for research into the energy harnessing potential of nanostructures. Their method achieved impressive performance and scalability. The prize, presented in a special category for algorithm innovation, was announced Thursday, Nov. 20, at the awards session of the SC08 conference in Austin. The researchers… Read More »

ATLAS Software Team Pushes Ahead Led by CRD's David Quarrie

September 11, 2008

GENEVA, Switzerland – When the ATLAS detector goes on line in 2007 as one of two experiments on CERN´s Large Hadron Collider, pairs of protons will be hurtling around the 27-kilometer accelerator ring and smashing into each other at a rate of about one billion collisions per second. This will translate into about 40 terabytes of data, only a small portion of which will be of interest to the team of 1,800 scientists working on the project. Still, the project envisions the need to store and… Read More »

Berkeley Lab Technology for Speeding up Searches of Large Databases Wins R&D 100 Award

July 21, 2008

BERKELEY, Calif.—An indexing technology developed by researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory which allows users to search massive datasets up to 40 times faster has been recognized with a 2008 R&D 100 award. The award, presented by R&D Magazine, “provides a mark of excellence known to industry, government, and academia as proof that the product is one of the most innovative ideas of the year.” The awards will be presented at a special ceremony in Chicago in October. Read More »

Research on Code Optimization Explores Multicore Computing, Wins Best Paper Award

April 18, 2008

A research paper exploring ways to make a popular scientific analysis code run smoothly on different types of multicore computers won a Best Paper Award at the 2008 IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS) this month. The paper’s lead author and CRD researcher, Samuel Williams, and his collaborators chose the lattice Bolzmann code to explore a broader issue: how to make best use of multicore supercomputers. The multicore trend started recently, and the… Read More »

CRD's Michael Wehner Contributes to National Report on Impacts of Climate Change on Transportation

March 12, 2008

WASHINGTON, D.C. – According to a report issued this week by the National Research Council, every mode of transportation in the U.S. will be affected as the climate changes, with the greatest impact expected to result from flooding of roads, railways, transit systems, and airport runways in coastal areas because of rising sea levels and surges brought on by more intense storms. Though the impacts of climate change will vary by region, it is certain they will be widespread and costly in human… Read More »

Berkeley Lab’s Vern Paxson Honored for Research Characterizing the Internet

February 20, 2008

Vern Paxson, a network researcher at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, has been awarded the Association for Computing Machinery’s Grace Murray Hopper Award for his work in measuring and characterizing the Internet. “His innovative techniques are used to assess new communications concepts, improve network performance, and prevent network intrusion,” according to the ACM. “ They provide both the research community and Internet operators with the… Read More »

LBNL Mathematician James Sethian Elected to National Academy of Engineering

February 12, 2008

James Sethian, head of the Mathematics Group at the U.S. Department of Energy’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. Sethian was one of 65 new members and nine foreign associates whose election was announced Friday, Feb. 8. Sethian was honored “for the development of efficient methods of tracking moving interfaces.” Sethian’s research has led to the… Read More »

December 2007 Staff Research Notes

December 10, 2007

Nano Poster Wins AwardThree researchers from won the Best Poster Award at the November SC07 supercomputing conference in Reno. Zhengji Zhao, Juan Meza and Lin-Wang Wang were recognized for their poster describing "A New O(N) Method for Petascale Nanoscience Simulations,” which describes new linear scaling three-dimensional fragment (LS3DF) method for ab initio electronic structure calculations. The poster was one of 39 accepted for the conference from more than 150 submissions. SC07 is the… Read More »

Science Journal Features Research On Petascale Enabling Technologies

December 5, 2007

The November 2007 issue of the Cyberinfrastructure Technology Watch (CTWatch) Quarterly included significant contributions – five out of the nine articles – from CRD researchers, who authored papers on code performance, software tools, visualization, scientific data management and data placement solutions for distributed petascale science. The issue featured articles written by dozens of researchers about SciDAC’s Centers for Enabling Technologies. SciDAC (Scientific Discovery through… Read More »

Deconstructing Microbes

November 22, 2007

A metagenome data management and analysis system developed and managed by CRD researchers contributed to a breakthrough research recently published in Nature that probed the genetic materials of microbes in a termite’s gut. Understanding how these microbes convert wood to energy for sustaining a termite’s life would help researchers figure out better ways to convert biomass to biofuels in factories. The microbes exude enzymes that efficiently break down the wood’s cellular structure, but… Read More »

Lab Authors' Paper in Nano Letters Draws Strong Interest

October 15, 2007

A research paper showing how zinc oxide can be manipulated to become a good material for photovoltaic devices was among the most-accessed paper published by Nano Letters in the third quarter. The paper, written by Joshua Schrier, Denis Demchenko and Lin-Wang Wang in CRD’s Scientific Computing Group, laid out the calculations that narrowed the band gap – the energy difference between the top of the valence band and the bottom of the conduction band – of zinc oxide. To effectively absorb… Read More »

Algorithm Solves Key Energy-reduction Issue in Describing Complex System

September 28, 2007

The SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing recently published the work by three CRD researchers that incorporated an algorithm they developed in computing the ground state energy and wave functions for describing the mechanics of a complex physical system. The paper, “A Trust Region Direct Constrained Minimization Algorithm for the Kohn-Sham Equation,” described the use of the direct constrained minimization (DCM) algorithm with the “trust region” technique to compute single electron… Read More »