Julian Borrill is a senior scientist in the Physics Division at Berkeley Lab. - Credit: Berkeley Lab
Space is vast, and so is the amount of data that comes from studying it – and NERSC is both a primary tool in managing that data and a leader in establishing systems for data-intensive science. Find out about NERSC’s role in cosmological research and big data as Berkeley Lab Physics Division scientist gives his talk “Big Bang, Big Data, Big Iron: 50 Years of Cosmic Microwave Background Studies at NERSC”, part of the NERSC@50 anniversary seminar series.
Julian Borrill is a senior scientist in the Physics Division at Berkeley Lab and a Senior Research Physicist at the Space Sciences Laboratory at UC Berkeley. His current work is focused on developing the tools that will be needed to manage the huge data sets being gathered by current and future Cosmic Microwave Background missions and to deploy them efficiently on multiple generations of high performance computing architecture.
He is the project data scientist and data management lead for CMB-S4, a data management committee member and simulations lead for the Simons Observatory, and a data management committee member and US data lead for LiteBIRD. For the last 20 years, he has also managed the CMB community HPC resources at NERSC.
Other research areas range from simulations of multi-dimensional knots of energy that might be generated in the first moments after the Big Bang to holistic performance evaluation of high performance computing systems using application-derived benchmarks.
Prior to moving to Berkeley in 1997, Borrill held postdoctoral positions at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, and Imperial College, London. He has an M.A. in Mathematics and Political Science from the University of Cambridge, an M.Sc. in Astrophysics from the University of London, an M.Sc. in Information Technology also from the University of London, and a D.Phil. in Physics from the University of Sussex.
About NERSC and Berkeley Lab
The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) is the mission computing facility for the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science, the nation’s single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences.
Located at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), NERSC serves 11,000 scientists at national laboratories and universities researching a wide range of problems in climate, fusion energy, materials sciences, physics, chemistry, computational biology, and other disciplines. An average of 2,000 peer-reviewed science results a year rely on NERSC resources and expertise, which has also supported the work of six Nobel prize-winning individuals and teams.
NERSC is a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility.