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A Clearer Picture of Carbon Sequestration
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 »
June 2007 Staff Research Notes
New Money, New AlgorithmsXiaoye “Sherry” Li has been awarded $10,000 from the France-Berkeley Fund, which aims to stimulate research exchanges among scientists from the University of California and France. Li, who is a researcher in CRD’s Scientific Computing Group, and her project co-leader from France, plan to use the money to further their work on developing novel algorithms for solving large sparse linear systems, used in many time-consuming computations in fields such as fluid… Read More »
CCSE's Marc Day Awarded NASA Allocation for Combustion Research
Research to quantify the formation of pollutants during natural gas combustion has received 1.5 million computing hours from NASA. Led by Marc Day in CRD’s Center for Computational Sciences and Engineering, the project, “Flames Dynamics and Emission Chemistry in High-Pressure Industrial Burners,” was one of the four awarded by NASA last month under its National Leadership Computing System initiative. The initiative sets out to support computationally intensive projects that advance a… Read More »
Nanowire’s Novel Properties Could Increase Power Output In Solar Cells
A CRD scientist has designed a nanowire with potential of generating electricity more efficiently than many conventional materials currently used for solar cells. Using gallium nitride and gallium phosphide, Lin-Wang Wang and two collaborators at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado have modeled the nanowire—a coaxial cable—that overcomes several key problems encountered in bulk material solar cells and hydrogen fuel production today. “Bulk materials have lots of… Read More »
Serving Up a Smoother Flow of Water Resources Data
A collaboration among Microsoft, Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley is underway to develop a scientific data server for amassing and organizing water data from diverse sources, a system that will accelerate research in the increasingly important areas of water and climate change. Called Microsoft e-Science, the project is part of the Berkeley Water Center’s effort to marshal expertise from public institutions and the private sector and support projects that enable researchers to easily access and… Read More »
Supercomputing Report Card
A comprehensive supercomputer performance evaluation undertaken by CRD scientists has won a Best Paper award in the Application track at the IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS), underscoring the significant contribution the research makes to improving scientific applications for the arrival of petascale computing. The paper, “Scientific Application Performance on Candidate PetaScale Platforms,” is an accumulation of four years of exhaustive study that… Read More »
