NERSCPowering Scientific Discovery for 50 Years

Science News

AI-based Approach Speeds Diagnosis of I/O Performance Bottlenecks in HPC

March 18, 2024

Using NERSC systems, researchers from Berkeley Lab have developed a novel AI-based method for diagnosing input/output (I/O) performance bottlenecks in high performance computing (HPC) that automatically identifies these bottlenecks at the job level and offers potential solutions. Read More »

Simulating Plasma, NERSC Systems Enable Efficient Microchip Production

March 4, 2024

Researchers at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory used supercomputers at NERSC to develop new simulation codes that improve current methods of producing microchips using plasma. Read More »

Perlmutter Provides Peek into Interior of Ice Giant Planets

January 22, 2024

Researchers at UC Berkeley used the Perlmutter supercomputer at NERSC to make progress toward a better understanding of chemistry inside ice giant planets, a step forward for planetary science that may also have applications on Earth. Read More »

NERSC Helps Uncover the Mechanism Behind the ‘Dolomite Problem’

January 9, 2024

Using supercomputers at NERSC, researchers have revealed the key mechanism that inhibits dolomite growth and explained how the mineral forms in nature. Read More »

Cori and Perlmutter Support New Understanding of Reaction Behind Salt-Based Nuclear Reactors

November 27, 2023

Using computing resources at NERSC, researchers have shown how electrons interact with ions of molten salts, providing insights into the processes that could occur inside next-generation salt-based nuclear reactors known as molten-salt reactors (MSRs). Read More »

NERSC Collaborations Help Illuminate Earth's Biodiversity

October 25, 2023

With the help of supercomputers at NERSC and support from the DOE's Exascale Computing Project, researchers in Berkeley Lab’s Applied Mathematics and Computational Research Division and at the Joint Genome Institute have developed new tools to advance the field of metagenomics and expand scientists’ understanding of our world’s biodiversity. Read More »

Perlmutter Supports First Gravitational Lensing System Modeled on GPUs

September 20, 2023

Using the GIGA-Lens modeling code on the Perlmutter supercomputer at NERSC, a team of researchers has modeled a rare instance of strong gravitational lensing known as an Einstein Cross—likely the first such system to be modeled on GPUs and a demonstration of the promise of GPU-accelerated modeling. Read More »

NERSC Assists in Search for More Sustainable EV Batteries

September 11, 2023

NERSC is helping a Berkeley Lab-led consortium of researchers speed the commercialization of a new family of batteries with more energy-dense cathodes that don’t require metals in short supply. Read More »

NERSC Helps Scientists Build Public Health Datasets from Location Services

September 7, 2023

Prompted by the COVID pandemic, scientists used NERSC resources to process location-based cell phone data and produce more detailed datasets that help them better estimate social contacts within public spaces. Read More »

How Scientists Are Accelerating Next-Gen Microelectronics

August 21, 2023

With the help of NERSC supercomputing resources and expertise, the newly launched Center for High Precision Patterning Science is developing a technique to pack over 100 billion transistors into a microchip the size of a fingernail. Read More »

NERSC Powers Insight Into Chemical Actuation of Self-Folding Origami Machines

July 31, 2023

3D microfabrication based on origami-inspired materials is a promising technique for building materials, structures, devices, and systems with unconventional electronic, mechanical, and optical properties. Read More »

Using Deep Learning to Assess Lithium Metal Battery Performance

July 14, 2023

A team of researchers from Berkeley Lab’s Center for Advanced Mathematics for Energy Research Applications and colleagues have developed batteryNET, a deep learning algorithm that enhances the assessment of lithium agglomeration in solid-state lithium metal batteries. Read More »

Three New Studies Emerge from NERSC Research on Climate Change, Extreme Weather

June 21, 2023

NERSC is a hub for climate and weather research, and three recent scientific journal articles all published within one month highlight the center’s continuing role in supporting this work. Read More »

DESI Early Data Release Holds Nearly Two Million Objects

June 13, 2023

NERSC makes the first batch of data from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument available for researchers to mine. Read More »

NERSC Supports First All-GPU Full-Scale Physics Simulation

June 6, 2023

Using supercomputers at NERSC, researchers have completed a simulation of a detector of neutrino interactions that’s designed to run exclusively on graphics processing units (GPUs)—the first simulation of its kind and an example of using GPUs’ highly parallel structure to process large amounts of physical data. Read More »

QIS Project Shows Novel Method for Privacy-Preserving Quantum ML

April 20, 2023

Scientific results from the initial QIS@Perlmutter projects are starting to emerge; in one recently published paper, a research group shared results of a quantum machine learning project that explores novel methods for preserving privacy within advanced quantum computing functions.
Read More »

Computational Modeling Streamlines Hunt for Battery Electrolytes

April 11, 2023

Using computing resources at NERSC at Berkeley Lab, researchers from the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research have identified new, more efficient ways to find improved electrolytes for batteries. By computationally modeling molecules and virtually observing their properties, researchers can identify the most promising ones and save experimental scientists from spending time and resources on those that won’t work. Read More »

New Math Methods and Perlmutter HPC Combine to Deliver Record-Breaking ML Algorithm

March 13, 2023

Using the Perlmutter supercomputer at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have devised a new mathematical method for analyzing extremely large datasets – and, in the process, demonstrated proof of principle on a record-breaking dataset of more than five million points. Read More »

Shining a light on electrons’ role in energy transfer among 2D materials

March 6, 2023

Using the Cori supercomputer, a group of scientists examined heat and energy movements between certain 2D materials, spurring discoveries that could pave the way for a new generation of transistors Read More »

Berkeley Lab Works Toward a Connected Future for Science

February 27, 2023

Superfacility is a conceptual model of seamless connection between experimental facilities and high performance computing resources – an integrated and automated system for gathering, transporting, and analyzing scientific data in real time. Berkeley Lab is working to standardize, automate, and scale up the processes needed for superfacility onsite across the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), and beyond. Read More »

The Most Advanced Bay Area Earthquake Simulations Will be Publicly Available

February 10, 2023

A collaboration involving scientists and computing resources from Berkeley Lab and the simulation software EQSIM is releasing the most accurate and detailed earthquake simulations to date, which will initially capture earthquake motions across the San Francisco Bay Area and later expand to other regions. Read More »

WarpX Code Shines at the Exascale Level

February 2, 2023

The WarpX project has spent the last six years creating a novel, highly parallel, and highly optimized single-source simulation code for modeling plasma-based particle colliders on cutting-edge exascale supercomputers, with broad importance for other accelerators and related problems. Read More »

Berkeley Lab Scientists Create Machine Learning Pipeline for Interpreting Large Tomography Datasets

January 25, 2023

A group of Berkeley Lab scientists has developed and tested several machine learning techniques organized in a learning pipeline to improve the interpretation of increasingly large cryo-ET datasets. Read More »

Perlmutter Results Show Progress in Quantum Information Science

January 23, 2023

The QIS@Perlmutter initiative at NERSC aims to support research in the space of quantum information science (QIS) conducted on the Perlmutter supercomputer, including quantum simulation of materials and chemical systems, algorithms for compilation of quantum circuits, error mitigation for quantum computing, and development of hybrid quantum/classical algorithms. The first phase of the project will come to an end this month, but has begun to bear fruit in the form of early science results and collaborations across the field. Read More »

New Search Method Expands Horizon in Hunt for New Polymer Electrolytes

January 17, 2023

Using computing resources at NERSC, researchers at MIT, in partnership with the Toyota Research Institute, have pioneered a new method for using machine learning to screen for new materials, yielding the largest dataset of polymer electrolytes ever seen in the field and signaling progress for the search for new materials generally. Read More »

New Climate Models Reveal Geographical Link Between Wildfires and Extreme Weather

December 13, 2022

A climate study led by PNNL researchers used NERSC resources to investigate a growing connection between wildfires in the Western U.S. and extreme weather in the Central U.S. The team ran a series of models on Cori and detected an evolving relationship between wildfires in one region and frequencies of heavy rainfall and large hail in the other. Read More »

NERSC’s Cori System Helps Shed New Light on Plasma Turbulence

November 10, 2022

With the help of supercomputers at NERSC, Columbia University, and NASA, astrophysicists ran large-scale simulations that show the precise movements of electrons and ions in the sun’s plasma. Read More »

NERSC Summer Student Puts MPI Under the Microscope

October 25, 2022

This summer, as part of the Berkeley Lab Computing Sciences Summer Program, Muna Tageldin developed a microbenchmark to analyze variances in message-passing interface (MPI) performance on NERSC systems and look for the best statistical methods to characterize the results. Read More »

HPSS: Celebrating 30 Years of Long-term Storage for Scientific Research

October 20, 2022

This year marks the 30th anniversary of the HPSS Collaboration, a partnership between five DOE national laboratories and IBM. Today the High Performance Storage System is still going strong, serving some 40 sites around the world and more than 4 exabytes of production archival storage data. Read More »

Materials Science Simulation Achieves Extreme Performance at NERSC

September 7, 2022

Powered by the new Perlmutter system at NERSC at Berkeley Lab, a team of researchers led by Paderborn University scientists Thomas D. Kühne and Christian Plessl used a new mixed-precision method to conduct the first electronic structure simulation that executed more than quintillion operations per second. Read More »

LUX-ZEPLIN Data-Management Needs Fuel Team Approach

August 29, 2022

The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) and the Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) located at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) are playing a critical role in facilitating the burgeoning LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment in its search for dark matter in the universe.Located deep in the Black Hills of South Dakota in the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF), the uniquely sensitive LZ dark matter detector recently passed a check-out phase of startup… Read More »

NERSC Summer Student Works Toward Machine Learning for a Rainy Day

August 15, 2022

As part of the 2022 Berkeley Lab Summer Student program, UC Berkeley PhD student James Duncan works to improve the resolution of precipitation models using machine learning, aiming to produce more accurate weather prediction. Read More »

NERSC Simulations Target ‘Forever Chemicals’ in Soils

July 14, 2022

With the growing awareness about the risks posed by “forever chemicals” in our water, soil, plants, and more, researchers are making new inroads into understanding how these substances function and how we might be able to mitigate their harmful effects. Fortunately, supercomputer simulations are aiding in these efforts. Read More »

Neuroscience Simulations at NERSC Shed Light on Origins of Human Brain Recordings

July 11, 2022

Using simulations run at NERSC, a team of researchers at Berkeley Lab has found the origin of cortical surface electrical signals in the brain and discovered why the signals originate where they do. Read More »

Simulations at NERSC Drive Progress Toward Nuclear Fusion

June 1, 2022

Simulations performed at NERSC at Berkeley Lab have brought researchers one step closer to producing efficient, endlessly renewable energy through nuclear fusion, harnessing the process that produces light and heat in our Sun and other stars. Read More »

Machine Learning Fuels Materials Science and Search in Continuous Action Spaces

May 17, 2022

Using computing resources at NERSC at Berkeley Lab, researchers at Argonne National Laboratory have succeeded in exploring important materials-science questions and demonstrated progress using machine learning to solve difficult search problems. Read More »

Researchers Narrow Down Mass of Sought-After Axion Particle

May 9, 2022

Researchers at Berkeley Lab and other institutions have narrowed the range of possible masses for the axion, a theoretical particle that may make up much of the dark matter in the universe. Read More »

San Francisco and Berkeley Lab Team Up on Pioneering Climate Study

April 27, 2022

Berkeley Lab computational resources are helping the City and County of San Francisco adapt to the Bay Area's changing climate and the extreme storms it is expected to bring. Read More »

Berkeley Lab Helps Fuel Advances for Renewable Energy Sources

April 7, 2022

Simulations run at NERSC could enhance the development of a new artificial photosynthesis device component – a promising step forward in validating the viability of renewable fuels. Read More »

Hydrogen Fuel Cells: An Environmentally Friendly Transportation Alternative

March 29, 2022

In the quest to develop alternatives to fossil fuels for a variety of transportation methods, environmentally friendly hydrogen fuel cells are finding favor – and funding. Read More »

Berkeley Lab Computing Resources Enable Deeper Understanding of Supernovae Explosions

March 23, 2022

An international research team recently made history by recording the earliest post-explosion detection of a Type Ia supernova, using cosmological models developed at Berkeley Lab and supercomputing resources at NERSC. Read More »

X-Ray Crystallography Goes Even Tinier

March 15, 2022

Supported by high-performance computing resources at NERSC, scientists at Berkeley Lab have debuted a new form of X-ray crystallography for small molecules not previously conducive to investigation with crystallography. Read More »

Fire and Ice: How Arctic Sea Ice Influences Western U.S. Wildfires

December 17, 2021

New research from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory describes how climate conditions in one part of the world can, over time, influence climate outcomes thousands of kilometers away. Simulations run on Cori helped confirm this link Read More »

Perlmutter-Powered Deep-Learning Model Speeds Extreme Weather Predictions

November 29, 2021

Researchers from Berkeley Lab, Caltech, and NVIDIA trained the Fourier Neural Operator deep learning model to emulate atmospheric dynamics and provide high-fidelity extreme weather predictions across the globe a full five days in advance. Read More »

NERSC Targets Exascale with Perlmutter and the Exascale Science Applications Program

October 18, 2021

With an eye toward the first generation of exascale computing, in 2021 NERSC unveiled its newest supercomputer, Perlmutter. To ensure that users can readily utilize this next-generation technology, NERSC has been working with development teams to prepare codes for Perlmutter and the coming exascale systems through NESAP. Read More »

NERSC Resources Power Advances in Solar Cell Efficiency

July 12, 2021

The steady improvement in silicon-based solar cells has made them cost competitive with fossil fuel sources, and additional advances in their efficiency will make them even more attractive. New materials such as hybrid perovskites are poised to give solar-cell efficiency a boost, and research being conducted at NERSC is helping to pick up the pace. Read More »

Project Jupyter: A Computer Code that Transformed Science

June 14, 2021

As Project Jupyter becomes an increasingly important tool for data science, HPC sites around the world are responding to the demand by looking for ways to effectively support them. And NERSC has been at the forefront of this effort. Read More »

Study of Harvey Flooding Aids in Quantifying Climate Change

June 9, 2021

How much do the effects of climate change contribute to extreme weather events? A new study investigated the question for one particular element of one significant storm: Hurricane Harvey. Read More »

Limit global warming to 1.5°C and halve the land ice contribution to sea level this century

May 5, 2021

A new study predicts that sea-level rise could be halved this century (from today to 2100) if we meet the Paris Agreement target of limiting global warming to 1.5°C. This work combines nearly 900 simulations, including some of Berkeley Lab Computational Scientist Dan Martin's BISICLES models of Antarctic ice sheets. Read More »

NERSC and ESnet Take Scientific Data Collaboration to the Next Level

April 12, 2021

When the Dark Energy Science Collaboration needed a fast, secure, and convenient way to share large data sets with scientists outside of the collaboration, they turned to Berkeley Lab Computing Sciences for help, ultimately choosing an innovative data-sharing solution: the Modern Research Data Portal. Read More »

Designing Selective Membranes for Batteries Using a Drug Discovery Toolbox

April 7, 2021

Researchers have designed a polymer membrane with molecular cages built into its pores that could allow high-voltage battery cells to operate at higher power and more efficiently, important factors for both electric vehicles and aircraft. Read More »

NERSC Aids PPPL in Plasma Rocket Breakthrough

March 30, 2021

A revolutionary new rocket engine design has come out of Princeton University, with an assist from the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Read More »

How Urbanization and Pollution Increase Storm Activity Around Cities

March 9, 2021

Using NERSC’s Cori system, PNNL researchers modeled the effects of urban land and aerosols on storm patterns in two major U.S. cities. Read More »

HPC Explorations of Supernova Explosions Help Physicists Reach New Milestones

February 25, 2021

For more than 60 years, physicists have been studying the question of how supernova explosions occur. Thanks to the increasing power of supercomputing resources such as those at NERSC, they’re moving ever closer to an answer. Read More »

Superfacility Model Brings COVID Research Into Real Time

February 8, 2021

Researchers at NERSC and the Linac Coherent Light Source at SLAC are collaborating to leverage the superfacility model for real-time data analysis in the worldwide quest to decipher the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Read More »

Novel Data Processing Technique Aids XFEL Protein Structure Analysis

January 26, 2021

Scientists use X-ray crystallography to determine the three-dimensional structures of proteins. A new data processing approach is enhancing the outcomes. Read More »

Measurements of Pulsar Accelerations Reveal Milky Way’s Dark Side

January 11, 2021

It is well known that the expansion of the universe is accelerating due to a mysterious dark energy. Within galaxies, stars also experience an acceleration, though this is due to some combination of dark matter and stellar density. Researchers using NERSC supercomputers have obtained the first direct measurement of the average acceleration taking place within our home galaxy, the Milky Way. Read More »

Novel Calculation Sheds New Light on Matter/Anti-Matter Mystery

December 14, 2020

An international collaboration of theoretical physicists has published a novel calculation that provides new insights into the relationship between matter and antimatter in the universe. This work included extensive use of NERSC supercomputing resources over six years. Read More »

Deep-Learning Research Nominated for Best Student Paper Award at SC20

November 16, 2020

A paper describing MeshfreeFlowNet — an open-source, physics-constrained, deep-learning approach for simultaneously enhancing the spatial and temporal resolution of scientific data — is a finalist for the Best Student Paper Award at SC20.“MeshfreeFlowNet is a big step forward in terms of physics-constrained machine learning algorithm development, combining important criteria necessary for scientific data: physics-based partial differential equation constraints, a mesh-free design that… Read More »

NERSC Supports COVID-19 Pandemic Response

November 2, 2020

Since April 2020, NERSC has allotted 2.5 million node hours on its Cori supercomputer and has provided dedicated HPC staff liaisons and other resources to support COVID-19 research. Read More »

Physical Scientists Turn to Deep Learning to Improve Earth Systems Modeling

August 25, 2020

The role of deep learning in science is at a turning point, with weather, climate, and Earth systems modeling emerging as an exciting application area for physics-informed deep learning. In this Q&A, NERSC's Karthik Kashinath discusses what is driving the scientific community to embrace these new methodologies. Read More »

NERSC Resources Play Key Role in CUPID-Mo Collaboration

August 21, 2020

Nuclear physicists affiliated with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) played a leading role in analyzing data for a demonstration experiment that has achieved record precision for a specialized detector material. The data-analysis component of this ground-breaking research was conducted entirely at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), a DOE Office of Science user facility located at Berkeley Lab. Read More »

Spectacular ultraviolet flash may finally explain how white dwarfs explode

July 23, 2020

For just the second time ever, astrophysicists have spotted a spectacular flash of ultraviolet light in a supernova, an extremely rare event following a white dwarf explosion. Read More »

Supercomputing Pipeline Aids DESI’s Quest to Create 3D Map of the Universe

July 20, 2020

The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument is combining high-speed automation, high-performance computing, and high-speed networking to produce the largest 3D map of the universe ever created. Starting in late 2020, DESI's five-year mission is to capture light from 35 million galaxies and 2.4 million quasars and transmit that data to NERSC - DESI’s primary computing center - for data processing and analysis. Read More »

Making Quantum ‘Waves’ in Ultrathin Materials

May 14, 2020

Running calculations at NERSC, a team of researchers co-led by Berkeley Lab have revealed how wavelike plasmons could power up a new class of sensing and photochemical technologies at the nanoscale. Read More »

Machine Learning Could Provide Unexpected Scientific Insights into COVID-19

April 29, 2020

A new text-mining tool developed at Berkeley Lab and supported by NERSC supercomputing resources is using natural language processing techniques that could yield unexpected scientific insights into COVID-19. Read More »

World's First 3D Simulations of Superluminous Supernovae

April 21, 2020

For the first time ever, an international team of astrophysicists simulated the 3D physics of superluminous supernovae—which are about a hundred times more luminous than typical supernovae—with NERSC supercomputers and the CASTRO code. Read More »

Harnessing the Power of Exascale for Wind Turbine Simulations

April 7, 2020

ExaWind, a DOE Exascale Computing Project, is developing new simulation capabilities to more accurately predict the complex flow physics of wind farms, and Berkeley Lab is bringing its adaptive mesh refinement expertise to the project to help make this happen. Read More »

NERSC’s Scientific Computing Power Steps into Coronavirus Battle

April 3, 2020

Researchers from the City of Hope’s Beckman Research Institute and the Translational Genomics Research Institute will use NERSC computing resources to help battle the COVID-19 global pandemic. Read More »

Earlier Spring Foliage Brings Warmer Air to the North

March 23, 2020

A group of researchers used NERSC to explore how early leaf growth, or “leaf-out,” affects the earth’s ecosystem. Their findings show that early spring leaf-out is causing a definitive increase in annual surface warming in the Northern Hemisphere. Read More »

Berkeley Lab Collaborates to Prepare Photovoltaic Materials Research for Exascale

March 5, 2020

NERSC and CRD researchers are part of a collaboration that is using BerkeleyGW software to enhance the search for new, more efficient photovoltaic solar cell materials on the first exascale computers. Read More »

NOAA Releases Extended Version of 20th Century Reanalysis Project

January 13, 2020

Calling it a time machine for weather data and a treasure trove for climate researchers, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has released an updated version of the 20th Century Reanalysis Project (20CRv3) - a high-resolution, four-dimensional reconstruction of the global climate that estimates what the weather was every day back to 1806.The release of this latest 20CRv3 data comes on the heels of an October 2019 release of data going back to 1836. Together these new… Read More »

Deep Learning Expands Study of Nuclear Waste Remediation

November 8, 2019

A research collaboration between Berkeley Lab, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Brown University, and NVIDIA has achieved exaflop performance with a deep learning application used to model subsurface flow in the study of nuclear waste remediation. Read More »

NERSC Powers Research on Post-Wildfire Water Availability

October 8, 2019

Scientists at Berkeley Lab recently took a closer look at how wildfires affect California’s watersheds. Computer simulations run at NERSC allowed them to identify the regions in the watershed that were most sensitive to wildfire conditions, as well as the hydrologic processes that are most affected. Read More »

NERSC Resources Help PPPL Team Predict Plasma Pressure in Future Fusion Facilities

September 27, 2019

Researchers at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory have developed new insights into the physics governing the balance of pressure in the scrape-off layer, the thin strip of gas at the edge of the plasma in a tokamak reactor. Read More »

Hydrogen a Culprit in Capacity Loss of Sodium-Ion Batteries

August 1, 2019

Using NERSC's Cori system, UC Santa Barbara computational materials scientist Chris Van de Walle and colleagues have uncovered a reason for the loss of capacity that occurs over time in sodium batteries. Read More »

Berkeley Lab Deep Learning Expertise Draws Attention at International Climatology Meeting

July 24, 2019

Berkeley Lab’s growing expertise in applying machine learning methods to extreme weather event studies led to invitations to present at the 2019 International Meeting on Statistical Climatology, a prestigious event held only every three years. Read More »

Scientists Piece Together the Largest U.S.-Based Dark Matter Experiment

July 22, 2019

Most of the remaining components needed to fully assemble an underground dark matter-search experiment called LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) arrived at the project’s South Dakota home during a rush of deliveries in June. Once it is up and running, data captured by the detectors’ electronics will ultimately be transferred to NERSC, LZ’s primary data center, via ESnet. Read More »

Three Sky Surveys Completed in Preparation for Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument

July 9, 2019

It took three sky surveys – conducted at telescopes in two continents, covering one-third of the visible sky, and requiring almost 1,000 observing nights – to prepare for a new project that will create the largest 3D map of the universe’s galaxies and glean new insights about the universe’s accelerating expansion. Read More »

NERSC’s Cori System Reveals Integral Role of Gluons in Proton Pressure Distribution

July 8, 2019

For the first time, lattice quantum chromodynamics calculations run at NERSC allowed nuclear physicists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to determine the pressure distribution inside a proton, taking into account the contributions of the proton’s fundamental particles: quarks and gluons. Read More »

Cleaning Cosmic Microwave Background Data to Measure Gravitational Lensing

June 6, 2019

Gravity from distant galaxies cause tiny distortions in cosmic microwave background temperature maps - a process called gravitational lensing - which are detected by data analysis software run on supercomputers like the Cori system at NERSC. Unfortunately, this temperature data is often corrupted by foreground emissions from extragalactic dust, gas, and other noise sources that are challenging to model. So Berkeley Lab researchers developed a statistical method for analyzing CMB data that is largely immune to the foreground noise effects.
Read More »

CosmoGAN: Training a Neural Network to Study Dark Matter

May 14, 2019

A Berkeley Lab-led research group is using a deep learning method known as generative adversarial networks to enhance the use of gravitational lensing in the study of dark matter. Read More »

Superfacility Framework Advances Photosynthesis Research

May 9, 2019

Researchers have long studied PSII, a protein complex in green plants, algae, and cyanobacteria that plays a crucial role in photosynthesis. Their understanding of this three-billion-year-old biological system is now moving more quickly, thanks to an integrated superfacility framework established between LCLS, ESnet, and NERSC. Read More »

A Breakthrough in the Study of Laser/Plasma Interactions

April 22, 2019

A new 3D particle-in-cell simulation tool developed by researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and CEA Saclay is enabling cutting-edge simulations of laser/plasma coupling mechanisms that were previously out of reach of standard PIC codes used in plasma research. Read More »

2019 DOE Performance Portability Meeting Breaks New Ground

April 15, 2019

The 2019 DOE Performance, Portability, and Productivity Annual Meeting once again brought together representatives from national labs, academia, and the vendor community to share ideas, progress, and challenges in achieving performance portability across DOE’s current and future supercomputers. Read More »

Searching for Photocathodes that Convert CO2 into Fuels

April 8, 2019

As scientists search for new materials to enable the photocatalytic conversion of CO2, a Berkeley Lab team used supercomputing resources at NERSC to perform a massive photocathode search, starting with 68,860 materials and screening them for specific intrinsic properties. Read More »

When Stars Collide: 3D Computer Simulation Captures Cosmic Event

January 12, 2019

The aftermath of the collision of two neutron stars has been fully captured in a 3D computer model for the first time, thanks to research by University of Alberta astrophysicist Rodrigo Fernández and an international team. Read More »

Revealing Reclusive Recombination Mechanisms in Solar Cell Materials

January 2, 2019

Researchers at UCSB used NERSC supercomputers to better understand key mechanisms behind the solar conversion efficiencies of hybrid perovskites, which could make these materials even more attractive for photovoltaics. Read More »

Shedding New Light on Luminous Blue Variable Stars

December 7, 2018

Three-dimensional simulations run at NERSC, Argonne and NASA have provided new insights into the behavior of a unique class of celestial bodies known as luminous blue variables - rare, massive stars that can shine up to a million times brighter than the Sun. Read More »

Simulations Run at NERSC Confirm Thermal and Electrical Properties of Superionic Crystals

October 9, 2018

Using a combination of experiments and simulations, materials scientists at Duke University, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Argonne National Laboratory have sussed out the physical phenomenon underlying the promising electrical and thermal properties of a class of materials called superionic crystals. Read More »

Berkeley Lab, Oak Ridge, NVIDIA Team Breaks Exaop Barrier With Deep Learning Application

October 5, 2018

A team of computational scientists from Berkeley Lab and Oak Ridge National Laboratory and engineers from NVIDIA has, for the first time, demonstrated an exascale-class deep learning application that has broken the exaop barrier. Read More »

HP-CONCORD Paves the Way for Scalable Machine Learning in HPC

October 1, 2018

A team of Berkeley Lab researchers has demonstrated how a new parallel algorithm called HP-CONCORD can help address some of the most challenging problems in data-driven science. Read More »

NERSC, Intel, Cray Harness the Power of Deep Learning to Better Understand the Universe

September 5, 2018

A Big Data Center collaboration between computational scientists at NERSC and engineers at Intel and Cray has yielded another first in the quest to apply deep learning to data-intensive science: CosmoFlow, the first large-scale science application to use the TensorFlow framework on a CPU-based high performance computing platform with synchronous training. Read More »

Topology, Physics & Machine Learning Take on Climate Research Data Challenges

September 4, 2018

Two PhD students who first came to Berkeley Lab as summer interns in 2016 are spending six months a year at the lab through 2020 developing new data analytics tools that could dramatically impact climate research and other large-scale science data projects. Read More »

Berkeley Lab Researchers Showcase Deep Learning for High Energy Physics at CHEP

August 17, 2018

Steve Farrell, a machine-learning engineer who recently joined NERSC, gave an overview of Berkeley Lab’s expanding expertise in deep learning for science during a plenary talk at the 2018 CHEP conference in July. Read More »

Batteries Get a Boost from ‘Pickled’ Electrolytes

August 1, 2018

Battery researchers at Argonne National Laboratory used computer simulations to help reveal the mechanism behind a common additive known to extend the life of lithium-ion batteries. Read More »

Berkeley Lab-Developed Digital Library is a Game Changer for Environmental Research

July 24, 2018

Developed by Berkeley Lab, NERSC and NCEAS researchers, ESS-DIVE is a new digital archive that serves as a repository for hundreds of U.S. Department of Energy-funded research projects under the agency’s Environmental System Science umbrella. Read More »

IceCube Neutrinos Point to Long-Sought Cosmic Ray Accelerator

July 12, 2018

An international team of scientists has found the first evidence of a source of high-energy cosmic neutrinos, ghostly subatomic particles that can travel unhindered for billions of light years from the most extreme environments in the universe to Earth. Read More »

NOvA experiment sees strong evidence for antineutrino oscillation

July 3, 2018

The Fermilab NOvA neutrino experiment announced that it has seen strong evidence of muon antineutrinos oscillating into electron antineutrinos over long distances, a phenomenon that has never been unambiguously observed. Image: Sandbox Studio Read More »

New Simulations Break Down Potential Impact of a Major Quake by Building Location and Size

June 28, 2018

A team of Berkeley Lab and LLNL researchers is leveraging powerful supercomputers at NERSC to portray the impact of high-frequency ground motion on thousands of representative different-sized buildings spread out across the California region. Read More »