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NERSC Center News

Jack Deslippe Joins NERSC User Services

December 19, 2011

As the newest material science and chemistry consultant in NERSC's User Services Group, Jack Deslippe will be building and evaluating material science packages, working with users on material science application needs, and providing general user support. Read More »

NERSC’s Steve Lowe: Driven to High Performance Machines

December 15, 2011

During his combined 29 years at Lawrence Livermore and Lawrence Berkeley national labs, Steve Lowe has worked with some of the most powerful computing machinery anywhere. But come Jan. 3, he’ll trade in his career and home in Tracy for a new lifestyle – retiring and spending a few years exploring North America with his wife in an RV. Read More »

Highlights From SC11

November 30, 2011

In November 2011, thousands of experts in computing and networking flocked to Seattle, Washington, to participate in tutorials, join panel discussions, lead sessions, give live demonstrations and talks, hold roundtable discussions, help build SCinet—the world's fastest science network—present posters and much more! Here are some highlights from this year's SC11 conference. Berkeley Lab's SC11 Booth - Top left and right photos by David Donofrio Prabhat and Yushu present 100G Demo- Bottom… Read More »

Berkeley Lab and NERSC Reach Out to Women in Computing

November 30, 2011

Berkeley Lab Computing Sciences staff reached out to women at the Grace Hopper Celebration in Portland, Ore. And, back in California, Katie Antypas, who heads NERSC's User Services Group, gave students from Mills College, historically a college for women, a lesson in parallel computing and a tour of the facility's supercomputers. This group also included a co-ed contingent from Mills College's graduate program. Read More »

Accelerating Advanced Material Development

October 31, 2011

Kristin Persson is one of the founding scientists behind the Materials Project, a computational tool aimed at taking the guesswork out of new materials discoveries, especially those aimed at energy applications like batteries. (Roy Kaltschmidt, LBNL) New materials are crucial to building a clean energy economy—for everything from batteries to photovoltaics to lighter weight vehicles—but today the development cycle is too slow: around 18 years from conception to commercialization. To speed… Read More »

NERSC Played Key Role in Nobel Laureate’s Discovery

October 4, 2011

Saul Perlmutter's, winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics, lead a team believed to have been the first to use supercomputers to analyze and validate observational data in cosmology. This melding of computational science and cosmology sowed the seeds for more projects, establishing Berkeley Lab and NERSC as centers for this new field. Read More »

Kathy Yelick Appointed to National Academies Computer Science and Telecommunications Board

September 15, 2011

Kathy Yelick Associate Laboratory Director for Computing Sciences Kathy Yelick has been appointed to the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB) of the National Academies, which includes the National Academy of Engineering, National Academy of Sciences, and the Institute of Medicine. CSTB is composed of nationally recognized experts from across the information technology fields and complementary fields germane to the Board's interests in IT and society. Board members are appointed… Read More »

Srinivasan Named Head of NERSC’s Computational Systems Group

August 31, 2011

Jay Srinivasan has been selected as the Computational Systems Group Lead in the NERSC Systems Department. In this role, he will supervise the day-to-day operation of all of NERSC's computer systems. Prior to taking on his new assignment, Srinivasan was the team lead for the PDSF cluster that supports Nuclear Physics and High Energy Physics. Srinivasan has more than 15 years of experience in high performance computing, both as a user and administrator. Since joining NERSC in 2001, he has worked… Read More »

Data Transfer Nodes Yield Results

August 1, 2011

The ability to reliably move and share data around the globe is essential to scientific collaboration, that’s why three Department of Energy (DOE) Scientific Computing Centers—Argonne and Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facilities, and the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC)—have teamed up to focus on optimizing wide area network (WAN) transfers. This ongoing effort began several years ago when each site deployed dedicated transfer nodes (DTNs), optimized for… Read More »

Data Tracking Increases Scientific Productivity

July 20, 2011

New supercomputers and networks are contributing to record levels of scientific productivity. To effectively meet the increasing scientific demand for storage systems and services, NERSC's staff must first understand how data moves within the facility. Now, a new dynamic database created by the NERSC Storage Systems Group has made this process easier than ever. Read More »

Hopper Among World’s Top 10 Fastest Computers

June 17, 2011

There are only 10 computers in the world with petaflops power—capable of calculating quadrillions of calculations in one second. According to the 37th edition of the Top500 List, the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center’s (NERSC’s) Cray XE6 “Hopper” system is one of them.   All of the systems on the TOP500 List are ranked on how fast they run Linpack, a benchmark application developed to solve a dense system of linear equations. With a Linpack benchmark performance… Read More »

Petaflops Power to NERSC

May 31, 2011

From left to right: Horst Simon (Berkeley Lab deputy director), Kathy Yelick (NERSC division director), Dan Hitchcock (DOE), Paul Alivisatos (Berkeley Lab director) standing in front of the Hopper supercomputer system recently accepted by NERSC. The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) recently marked a major milestone, putting its first petascale supercomputer into the hands of its 4,000 scientific users. The flagship Cray XE6 system is called “Hopper” in honor of… Read More »

NERSC Users Showered With Accolades

April 29, 2011

April brought in a shower of accolades to longtime NERSC users. Read More »

NERSC Cited for Innovative Use of Globus Online

April 14, 2011

Globus Online was originally developed as a reliable and secure tool for moving data between remote sites, but NERSC staff also found that it could be used to easily move data between computing systems and the center's HPSS data archive. Read More »

Kathy Yelick Co-authors National Research Council Report

March 22, 2011

Associate Laboratory Director for Computing Sciences at Berkeley Lab and director of the lab’s NERSC Division, Kathy Yelick was a panelist in a March 22 discussion of "The Future of Computer Performance: Game Over or Next Level?” a new report by the National Research Council. Read More »

NERSC Hosts HS Students on Job Shadow Day

March 15, 2011

Eighteen students from Richmond's Kennedy High School's TechFutures Academy paid a visit to the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at the Berkeley Lab's Oakland Science Facility on February 9, 2011. Read More »

Japanese Computing Center Discusses Potential Collaborations

February 26, 2011

Representatives from Japan’s Tsukuba University’s Center for Computational Sciences (CCS) visited Berkeley Lab on Feb. 24-25 to meet with researchers from NERSC and CRD and to explore areas of potential collaboration. Read More »

X-ray Image Bank Open for Business

February 22, 2011

Now open for business: A new data bank where scientists from around the world can deposit and share images generated by coherent x-ray light sources. Read More »

Richmond's Kennedy High Visits NERSC

February 10, 2011

Eighteen students from Richmond's Kennedy High School's TechFutures Academy paid a visit to the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at the Berkeley Lab's Oakland Science Facility on February 9, 2011. Read More »

'Insights of the Decade' Enabled by NERSC

February 10, 2011

Three of ten "Insights of the Decade," as named by Science Magazine, were enabled in part by facilities and research in Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC). Read More »

NERSC Users Pruess and Ramesh elected to National Academy of Engineering

February 9, 2011

Karsten Pruess of Berkeley Lab’s Earth Sciences Division (ESD) and Ramamoorthy Ramesh of the Materials Sciences Division (MSD), both NERSC users, were elected to the National Academy of Engineering. Read More »

Bobby Liu Joins NERSC as Postdoctoral Fellow

January 31, 2011

NERSC Computational Science Postdoctoral Fellow WangYi "Bobby" Liu joins staff. Read More »

NERSC User James Drake Receives 2010 APS Maxwell Prize for Plasma Physics

January 31, 2011

Long-time NERSC user James Drake has been awarded the 2010 James Clerk Maxwell Prize for Plasma Physics, the highest honor bestowed to plasma physicists by the American Physical Society (APS). Read More »

NERSC Hosts Contra Costa College Parallel Computing Club

January 14, 2011

Eleven members of the Contra Costa College Parallel Computing Club paid a visit to NERSC at the Berkeley Lab's Oakland Science Facility on January 14. Read More »

Dirac Testbed Reveals How Applications are Written

January 7, 2011

Graphics processing units, or GPUs, may have been invented to power video games, but today these massively parallel devices are being pressed into high-performance computing, or HPC. With improving programming toolsets, commercial computer vendors have become more confident in selling GPU-accelerated systems but, in the world of science, GPUs are still almost as experimental as the problems they are expected to solve. Read More »