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NERSC Center News

DOE Allocates Massive Supercomputer Resources to Drive Advances in Combustion, Astrophysics and Protein Structure Research

December 22, 2004

Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham announced today that 6.5 million hours of supercomputing time have been awarded to three scientific research projects aimed at increasing our understanding of ways to reduce pollution, gaining greater insight into how stars and solar systems form, and advancing our knowledge about how proteins express genetic information. Read More »

INCITE Awards 6.5 Million Hours at NERSC to Research in Combustion, Astrophysics and Protein Structure

December 1, 2004

Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham announced on Dec. 22 that 6.5 million hours of supercomputing time at NERSC have been awarded to three scientific research projects aimed at increasing our understanding of ways to reduce pollution, gaining greater insight into how stars and solar systems form, and advancing our knowledge about how proteins express genetic information. “As one of the nation’s leading agencies for advancing scientific research, the Energy Department is proud to be able to… Read More »

Two NERSC Users Honored by AGU

December 1, 2004

At the 2004 American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting, NERSC users Inez Yau-Sheung Fung and Garrison “Gary” Sposito were among the 12 recipients of AGU medals for excellence in research. The meeting was held Dec. 13-17 in San Francisco. Inez Fung Fung, director of the Center for Atmospheric Sciences and a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, was awarded the Roger Revelle Medal. Established in 1991, the Revelle Medal recognizes outstanding accomplishments or… Read More »

Berkeley Lab Scientists Gain New Insight on Photosynthesis

October 1, 2004

Solar power remains the ultimate Olympic gold medal dream of a clean, efficient and sustainable source of energy. The problem has been that in order to replace fossil fuels, we need to get a lot more proficient at harvesting sunlight and converting it into energy. Nature has solved this problem through photosynthesis. All we have to do is emulate it. Read More »

NERSC, LBNL Staff Share Expertise at Cyber Security Summit

October 1, 2004

When cyber security experts from some of the nation’s top research institutions gathered Sept. 27-28 for a summit meeting to better prepare for future cyber attacks, NERSC and LBNL were there to share their experience and expertise. Cyber Security Summit 2004, an invitation-only workshop held in Arlington, Va., was organized by the National Center for Atmospheric Research, with support from the National Science Foundation. A major driver for the meeting was the series of debilitating attacks… Read More »

INCITE PIs to Present Results at SC2004

October 1, 2004

The principal investigators of the three computational science projects enabled by the first year of allocations under the U.S. Department of Energy’s INCITE program will discuss their work in a series of presentations in the Berkeley Lab booth (#139) at the SC2004 conference in Pittsburgh. INCITE, the Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment program, sought out computationally intensive large-scale research projects that could make high-impact scientific advances… Read More »

The Fastest Computers in the World

August 1, 2004

Since 1993, the TOP500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers has been released twice a year. The publication of the 23rd list a few weeks ago during the International Supercomputer Conference in Heidelberg, Germany, was a much-anticipated and closely watched event. Read More »

PDSF to Boost Processors, Performance

August 1, 2004

Researchers using the PDSF cluster managed by NERSC will soon have access to more processing power and benefit from a higher speed network connection for accessing archived data. New hardware is being shipped and is expected to be installed by the end of September. The additions include 48 nodes of dual Xeon processors and 10 nodes of dual Opteron processors. These will be added to the existing 550 processor cluster.The system’s connection to NERSC’s internal network will be upgraded from a… Read More »

NERSC, LBNL Staff to Share Expertise at Cyber Security Summit

August 1, 2004

When cybersecurity experts from some of the nation’s top research institutions gather Sept. 27-28 for a summit meeting to better prepare for future cyber attacks, NERSC and LBNL will share their experience and expertise. Cybersecurity Summit 2004, an invitation-only workshop to be held in Arlington, Va., is being organized by the National Center for Atmospheric Research, with support from the National Science Foundation. A major driver for the meeting was the series of debilitating attacks… Read More »

DOE Office of Science INCITE Program Seeking Proposals for Large-Scale Scientific Computing

July 13, 2004

Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham announced today that proposals are being accepted for a Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science program to support innovative, large-scale computational science projects which will allow for high-impact scientific advances through the use of a substantial allocation of computer time and data storage at the department's scientific computing center in Berkeley, Calif.
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INCITE Update: Turbulence Researchers Find Smooth Sailing at NERSC

June 1, 2004

There are real advantages in computing at NERSC, and a project led by Professor P. K. Yeung of the Georgia Institute of Technology to study “Fluid Turbulence and Mixing at High Reynolds Number” now wants to take full advantage of those advantages. The project, one of three selected by DOE’s INCITE program, was initially awarded 1.2 million processor hours at NERSC. The project team was also awarded a similar allocation at an NSF computing center. Because the two grants had different… Read More »

Benchmarking Team from LBNL/NERSC Makes News in Japan

June 1, 2004

Late last year, four researchers from the NERSC Center and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Computational Research Division spent nearly one week at the Earth Simulator Center in Japan. Their objective was to run a series of scientific applications on the Japanese supercomputer, in part to assess the viability of the Earth Simulator’s vector architecture for codes important to the DOE Office of Science mission. The visit merited an article and photo in the Japanese-language “ES… Read More »

NERSC’s David Skinner Gets Hands on IBM Blue Gene Prototype

April 1, 2004

David Skinner, who is the lead NERSC consultant for the Seaborg system, was working on a performance monitoring project at IBM’s Watson Center in New York earlier this year when an unexpected opportunity presented itself. “There was a BlueGene/L prototype available while I was there, and IBM Research was interested in getting more experience with real users and codes on the machine,” Skinner said. “This was the first real contact NERSC has had with this architecture, which is one of the… Read More »

NERSC Users Post Impressive Record of Published Results

April 1, 2004

In 2003, the Web site for requesting NERSC allocations added a field requesting information about scientific publications related to research using NERSC resources. As a result, NERSC users reported a total of 2,404 peer-reviewed papers based, at least in part, on work done at NERSC.The complete list, organized alphabetically by principal investigator, can be found on the Web at… Read More »

NERSC-ANL Blue Planet Proposal Serves as Blueprint for ASCI Purple

March 3, 2004

Two separate events, both aimed at dramatically advancing scientific computing and announced within a month of each other in late 2002, converged in 2003 and will result in DOE’s leadership in high-performance computing for years to come. The first step was the publication in October 2002 of an idea often referred to as “Blue Planet." A month later, DOE announced that IBM had been selected to build ASCI Purple, the fifth generation ASCI supercomputer for the stockpile stewardship program. Read More »

NERSC Helps Make Strides Toward Open Science Grid

February 1, 2004

In addition to making all of its production systems available via the DOE Science Grid, NERSC is also participating in the Open Science Grid initiative. Late last year, NERSC’s 400-processor PDSF cluster was integrated into a broad scientific grid currently connecting 27 sites in the U.S. and South Korea. Driven by the high energy physics community to help prepare for participation in multi-institution experiments on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the Open Science Grid (OSG) aims to tie… Read More »

All NERSC Production Systems Now on the Grid

February 1, 2004

With the new year came good news for NERSC users – all of NERSC’s production computing and storage resources are now Grid-enabled and can be accessed by users who have Grid applications using the Globus Toolkit. As a result, Grid users now have access to NERSC’s IBM supercomputer (“Seaborg”), HPSS, the PDSF cluster, the visualization server “Escher,” and the math server “Newton.” Users can also get support for Grid-related issues from NERSC’s User Services Group. “Now that… Read More »

NERSC’s QCD Library is a Model Resource

February 1, 2004

 Five years ago, when the first libraries of lattice QCD data were established at NERSC, the idea of making such information easily accessible to researchers at institutions around the world was a bold new approach. In fact, “The NERSC Archive” format, as it is colloquially known, has become a standard for the lattice storage format, which made exchanging lattices between groups much more efficient. The result is that lattice QCD researchers can avoid the time consuming and… Read More »

Cray Testing Red Storm Software at NERSC

January 9, 2004

High-performance computing experts from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) National Energy Research Scientific Computing (NERSC) Center and Cray Inc. have completed the initial operating system and message-passing functional scalability testing for the Red Storm supercomputer currently being developed by Cray Inc. and DOE’s Sandia National Laboratories. The successful effort paves the way for the next stage of testing of I/O (input/output) of two potential Red Storm file systems. Red… Read More »