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NERSC Center News

Horst Simon Steps Down As NERSC Director

December 12, 2006

Horst Simon, who has been director of DOE's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) since early 1996, announced last month that he was stepping down in order to focus his energy on the two other positions he holds at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Once a new director for NERSC is hired, Simon will concentrate on his duties as Associate Laboratory Director for Computing Sciences and Computational Research Division (CRD) Director. With the search for a new NERSC leader officially under way, Simon took some time to talk about his decision and how he sees his future. Read More »

Berkeley Lab to Showcase HPC and Networking Leadership in Talks, Demos at SC06 Conference

November 11, 2006

Computing and networking experts from the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory will share their leadership expertise via talks, technical papers and demonstrations at the SC06 conference to be held Nov. 11–17 in Tampa , Fla. Read More »

The Software Challenges of Petascale Computing

November 10, 2006

In this HPCwire interview, Kathy Yelick, one of the world's leading performance evaluation experts, discusses software challenges related to petascale and other large-scale computing systems. Yelick is a professor of computer science at UC Berkeley, with a joint appointment in Lawrence Berkeley Lab's Computational Research Division, where she leads the Future Technologies Group and the Berkeley Institute for Performance Studies. Read More »

The Yin and Yang of Understanding Data

November 3, 2006

When the Department of Energy's Office of Science announced the latest round of awards in the Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) program in September, the funded projects included a new Center for Enabling Technologies that will focus on meeting the visualization and analytics needs of scientists. Called the SciDAC Visualization and Analytics Center for Enabling Technologies, or VACET, the project will be co-led by Wes Bethel, head of the Visualization Group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Chris Johnson, director of the Scientific Computing Institute of the University of Utah. Read More »

LBNL to Lead Five Projects, Partner in Eight Others under DOE's Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing Program

September 7, 2006

Under the second round of the Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) program announced today by the U.S. Department of Energy, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory will lead five of the 30 projects and play a key partnership role in eight others. Read More »

INCITE Allocation Helping Drive Research in Future Accelerator Design

September 1, 2006

Using an allocation of 2.5 million processor hours on Seaborg at NERSC, a  team led by Cameron Geddes of  Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory  is creating detailed 3D simulations of  laser-driven wakefield particle accelerators (LWFAs), providing crucial under- standing of the next generation of particle  accelerators and ultrafast applications in  chemistry and biology.  The allocation was awarded under DOE’s  Innovative and Novel Computational  Impact on Theory and Experiment … Read More »

First Cabinet of NERSC’s New Cray Supercomputer Arrives for Testing

September 1, 2006

Within weeks of the announcement that NERSC’s next large system will be a follow-on to the Cray XT3 supercomputer, the first cabinet of the new machine has been installed for testing at Berkeley Lab’s Oakland Scientific Facility. The new supercomputer, which will be among the world’s fastest general purpose system, will have a guaranteed sustained performance of at least 16 trillion calculations per second (with a theoretical peak speed of 100 trillion calculations per second) when… Read More »

ESnet and Internet2 Partner To Deploy Next Generation Network for Scientific Research and Discovery

August 31, 2006

The Department of Energy’s (DOE) Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) and Internet2 — two of the nation’s leading networking organizations dedicated to research — today announced a partnership to deploy a highly reliable, high capacity nationwide network that will greatly enhance the capabilities of researchers across the country who participate in the DOE’s scientific research efforts. Read More »

Cray Wins $52 Million Supercomputer Contract with NERSC

August 10, 2006

Cray Inc. (NASDAQ GM: CRAY) and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science announced today that Cray has won the contract to install a next-generation supercomputer at the DOE’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC). The systems and multi-year services contract, valued at over $52 million, includes delivery of a Cray massively parallel processor supercomputer, code-named “Hood.” Read More »

Energy Department Providing Additional Supercomputing Resources to Study Hurricane Effects on Gulf Coast

July 16, 2006

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced today that the Office of Science has provided an additional 400,000 supercomputing processor-hours to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to simulate Gulf Coast hurricanes. The allocation brings the amount of computational time provided by DOE on supercomputers at its National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) in California to 800,000 processor-hours. Read More »

NERSC Users Report Over 1,400 Publications in 2005

February 1, 2006

As part of their 2006 allocations request, NERSC users were asked to submit lists of articles and conference papers resulting from their computations at NERSC over the preceding 12 months. A total of 1,448 publications, which had either been published or accepted, were noted. The total does not include those papers listed as “submitted” or “in preparation.” “This is an inspiring list of publications, both in the number and the breadth of science covered,” said NERSC Division… Read More »

201 Users Participate in Annual User Survey

February 1, 2006

The results from the 2005 user survey are now available and show generally high satisfaction with NERSC’s systems and support.Areas with the highest user satisfaction include account support services, the reliability and uptime of the HPSS mass storage system, and HPC consulting. The largest increases in satisfaction over last year’s survey include the NERSC CVS server, the Seaborg batch queue structure, PDSF compilers, Seaborg uptime, available computing hardware and network… Read More »

NERSC Global Filesystem Now Provides Seamless Data Access from All Systems

February 1, 2006

In February, NERSC deployed the NERSC Global Filesystem (NGF) into production, providing seamless data access from all of the Centers’ computational and analysis resources. With NGF, users can now run applications on Seaborg, for example, then use  DaVinci to visualize the data without having to explicitly move a single data file. Greg Butler NGF is intended to facilitate sharing of data between users and/or machines. For example, if a project has multiple users who must all access a… Read More »

NERSC Team Takes StorCloud Honors at SC05 Conference

February 1, 2006

One of the goals of providing comprehensive computing resources is to make the different components “transparent” to the end user. But if you are staff members demonstrating a groundbreaking approach for accessing distributed storage, such invisibility isn’t so desirable. That was the case for a NERSC/LBNL team competing in the StorCloud Challenge at the SC05 conference held Nov. 12-18, 2005, in Seattle.The team, led by Will Baird of NERSC’s Computational Systems Group, was given an… Read More »

DOE's Office of Science Awards 18 Million Hours of Supercomputing Time to 15 Teams for Large-Scale Scientific Computing

January 31, 2006

Secretary of Energy Samuel W. Bodman announced today that DOE’s Office of Science has awarded a total of 18.2 million hours of computing time on some of the world’s most powerful supercomputers to help researchers in government labs, universities and industry tackle some of the most challenging scientific problems of our time. Read More »

New IBM Cluster to Enter Production January 9

January 5, 2006

NERSC will open its newest high performance computing system, an IBM cluster with 888 processors for parallel computing, for production use on Monday, Jan. 9, 2006. During the acceptance testing, users reported that codes ran from 3 to 10 times faster on the new cluster, Bassi, than on NERSC's other IBM supercomputer, Seaborg, leading one tester to call the system the “best machine I have seen.” Read More »