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BISICLES Captures Details of Retreating Antarctic Ice

Satellite observations suggest that the shrinking West Antarctic ice sheet is contributing to global sea level rise. But until recently, scientists could not accurately model the physical processes driving retreat of the ice sheet. Now, a new ice sheet model—BISICLES—is shedding light on these details. Read More »

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Reading the Cosmic Writing on the Wall

March 21, 2013

Thanks to a sensitive space telescope and some sophisticated supercomputing performed at NERSC, scientists from the international Planck collaboration have made the closest reading yet of the most ancient story in our universe: the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Read More »

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Simulations Yield Clues to How Cells Interact With Surroundings

Computer models offer a new look at the molecular machinery that enables cells to interact with their environment. The research has implications for cancer and atherosclerosis research. Read More »

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NERSC Global Filesystem Played a Key Role in Discovery of the Last Neutrino Mixing Angle

Discovery of the last neutrino mixing angle was announced in March 2012, just a few months after the Daya Bay Neutrino Experiment’s first detectors went online in southeast China. But that result might not have been available so quickly without the NERSC Global Filesystem (NGF) infrastructure, which allowed staff at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) NERSC to rapidly scale up disk and node resources to accommodate the surprisingly large influx of data. Read More »

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A Massive Stellar Burst, Before the Supernova

February 6, 2013 | Tags: Carver, High Energy Physics, supernovae

An automated supernova hunt is shedding new light on the death sequence of massive stars—specifically, the kind that self-destruct in Type IIn supernova explosions. Read More »

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NERSC Supercomputers Help Explain the Last Big Freeze

About 13,000 years ago, a catastrophic injection of freshwater into the North Atlantic “conveyor” triggered a major cold spell. But, how did the freshwater get there? With help from NERSC, two researchers may have finally solved this mystery. Read More »

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NERSC Contributes to Smithsonian Magazine's Surprising Scientific Milestones of 2012

January 23, 2013 | Tags: Carver, Chemistry, Materials Science

Using NERSC supercomputers, MIT researchers came up with a new approach for desalinating sea water using sheets of graphene, a one-atom-thick form of the element carbon. Smithsonian Magazine named this result the fifth "Surprising Scientific Milestone of 2012. Read More »

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NERSC Contributes to Science Magazine's Breakthroughs of the Year

Of the top 10 finalists for Science mag's 2012 "Breakthrough of the Year," NERSC provided critical computing and archival support to two accomplishments. Read More »