On May 1, 1992, at a meeting of the American Physical Society, Smoot made an announcement that essentially silenced all the scientific critics of the Big Bang theory and helped change the course of future investigations into the origin and evolution of the universe. Smoot and his research team, after analyzing hundreds of millions of precision measurements in the data they had gathered from an experiment aboard NASA’s Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite, had produced maps of the entire sky which showed “hot” and “cold” regions with temperature differences of a hundred-thousandth of a degree. These temperature fluctuations, produced when the universe was smaller than a single proton, were consistent with Big Bang predictions and are believed to be the primordial seeds from which our present universe grew.

The COBE data analysis was conducted using computers at Berkeley Lab and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, but as subsequent experiments produced ever larger data sets, faster computers and bigger data archives were required. So, over the past ten years, Smoot and his colleagues studying cosmic microwave background (CMB) data have used nearly 5 million processor-hours and tens of terabytes of disk space at NERSC. In fact, around 100 analysts from a dozen CMB experiments are now NERSC users.

Two years ago, to simulate processing an entire year’s worth of data from Planck, the third-generation CMB space mission, Smoot’s team used 6,000 processors on NERSC’s Seaborg supercomputer for nearly two hours—the first time virtually all of the processors were used on a single code—mapping 75 billion observations to 150 million pixels. For comparison, the COBE sky map had used only 6,144 pixels.

Other NERSC users who received awards and honors for their achievements include:

Members of the National Academy of Sciences 

• David Baker, Howard Hughes Medical Institute and University of Washington, Seattle
• Joachim Frank, Howard Hughes Medical Institute and State University of New York at Albany
• Stanford Woosley, University of California, Santa Cruz

Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

• Stuart J. Freedman, University of California, Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory 

Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science

• Stuart J. Freedman, University of California, Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
• Steven G. Louie, University of California, Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
• William J. Weber, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

American Physical Society Tom W. Bonner Prize

• Stuart J. Freedman, University of California, Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Fellows of the American Physical Society

• Choong-Seock Chang, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University
• Guo-yong Fu, Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory
• Ian Hinchliffe, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
• Mark J. Hogan, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
• Zhihong Lin, University of California, Irvine
• Howard S. Matis, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
• Lin-Wang Wang, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
• Pui-Kuen Yeung, Georgia Institute of Technology

FELLOW OF THE INSTITUTE OF ELECTRICAL AND ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS

• Warren Mori, University of California, Los Angeles

American Physical Society Marshall N. Rosenbluth Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Award

• Cameron Geddes, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory