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NERSC Center News

The Next Step in Powering Computers

November 5, 2007

A report by Richard Hart of KGO-TV (ABC 7 in San Francisco) describes the expanding energy consumption of data centers — and how some large Silicon Valley companies are now building outside the area because they can't get enough electricity. Read More »

National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center Announces Acceptance of One of the World's Largest Supercomputers

November 1, 2007

The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Cray Inc. today announced the successful completion of the acceptance test of one of the world’s largest supercomputers. Installed at the DOE’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), the powerful Cray XT4™ system contains nearly 20,000 processor cores and has a top processing speed of more than 100 teraflops. Read More »

Model Comparisons

November 1, 2007

Scientists from the Advanced Plasma Microturbulence Project have published several papers recently that show how they resolve the significant differences between two types of electron temperature gradient (ETG) turbulence simulations in fusion research. The researchers have been running simulations at NERSC using particle-in-cell (PIC) and continuum gyrokinetic codes in order to reconcile the large gap of electron thermal conductivity values between the two types of simulations.Investigating… Read More »

SPOTLIGHT

November 1, 2007

VISIT FROM STUTTGART COMPUTING CENTER DELEGATION Wolfram Ressel, Rector of the University of Stuttgart, and three senior representatives of the High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS), visited Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and NERSC in October. The visitors were particularly interested in energy-efficient architectural designs being drawn up for Berkeley Lab's planned Computational Research and Theory facility, which will house both NERSC and the Computational Research… Read More »

Prof. Kathy Yelick Named New Director for DOE’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center

October 29, 2007

Dr. Katherine A. Yelick BERKELEY, Calif.—Kathy Yelick, a professor of computer science at the University of California at Berkeley and an internationally recognized expert in developing methods to advance the use of supercomputers, has been named director of the Department of Energy’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC). NERSC is DOE’s flagship computing center for unclassified research and is managed by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The center provides… Read More »

Up to Speed

May 1, 2007

A DOE workshop hosted by NERSC  brought together the international supercomputing community in May to identify  challenges for deploying petascale systems,  a collaboration that resulted in a series of  recommendations.  The two-day meeting in San Francisco  attracted about 70 participants from roughly  30 supercomputer centers, vendors, other  research institutions and DOE program  managers from Advanced Scientific  Computing Research (ASCR),… Read More »

Wanted: Killer Apps

May 1, 2007

NERSC staff members are playing an  increasingly active role in high-performance computing software integration and  development, as they face a greater  demand for marrying software from a  variety of supercomputer makers with  applications from a wide range of scientific fields.  That’s the message from David  Skinner, head of NERSC’s Open  Software and Programming Group, which  carries out in-house software development and deployment projects to help  researchers run their… Read More »

Open for Science

May 1, 2007

More NERSC users can now launch  and manage their work at multiple computing sites by going through a centralized  grid, thanks to efforts to connect NERSC’s  systems to the Open Science Grid (OSG).  The SGI Altix 350 visualization server,  named DaVinci, joined the OSG last  month, the latest in a long-range plan to  connect all NERSC supercomputers to the  grid, said Shreyas Cholia, a member of  the Open Software and Programming  Group at NERSC.   Making NERSC part of the more… Read More »

Swiss Connection

May 1, 2007

  NERSC General Manager Bill Kramer (left) led a tour of NERSC’s computer room for visitors from the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre. The man from right is Richard Alexander (Senior System Engineer), Hussein Harake (System Engineer), Domink Ulmer (COO, Head of Administration) and Ladina Gily (Event Manager, HR Manager, Head of Facility Management).   NERSC hosted four visitors from CSCS (Swiss National Supercomputing Centre) last Friday, May 4. After NERSC staff members gave… Read More »

Confronting Parallelism: The View from Berkeley

March 2, 2007

To explore the important new paper on the challenges of parallelism, "The View from Berkeley," HPCwire talked with NERSC computer scientist John Shalf and David Patterson, professor of computer science at UC-Berkeley. Shalf and Patterson are among the co-authors of "The View from Berkeley. Read More »

Cray Delivers First Third of the Franklin XT4 System to NERSC

January 16, 2007

On Tuesday, January 16, 2007, NERSC received the first installment of its new Cray XT4 supercomputer. Although a test system had been delivered the previous fall, the delivery of 36 cabinets (including 3,336 computational dual core nodes) marks the start of the installation of the full system, which is expected to go into production this summer. Read More »

DOE INCITE Program Awards Large Allocations at NERSC to Study Supernovae, Fusion Energy, Climate Change, Combustion, Chemistry and Accelerator Design

January 8, 2007

The U.S. Department of Energy announced today that it has allocated a large amount of supercomputing resources from the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory as part of an initiative to accelerate scientific research and promote innovations in public institutions and private industry. Read More »