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Machine Learning Fuels Materials Science and Search in Continuous Action Spaces
Using computing resources at NERSC at Berkeley Lab, researchers at Argonne National Laboratory have succeeded in exploring important materials-science questions and demonstrated progress using machine learning to solve difficult search problems. Read More »
Researchers Narrow Down Mass of Sought-After Axion Particle
Researchers at Berkeley Lab and other institutions have narrowed the range of possible masses for the axion, a theoretical particle that may make up much of the dark matter in the universe. Read More »
San Francisco and Berkeley Lab Team Up on Pioneering Climate Study
Berkeley Lab computational resources are helping the City and County of San Francisco adapt to the Bay Area's changing climate and the extreme storms it is expected to bring. Read More »
Berkeley Lab Helps Fuel Advances for Renewable Energy Sources
Simulations run at NERSC could enhance the development of a new artificial photosynthesis device component – a promising step forward in validating the viability of renewable fuels. Read More »
Hydrogen Fuel Cells: An Environmentally Friendly Transportation Alternative
In the quest to develop alternatives to fossil fuels for a variety of transportation methods, environmentally friendly hydrogen fuel cells are finding favor – and funding. Read More »
Berkeley Lab Computing Resources Enable Deeper Understanding of Supernovae Explosions
An international research team recently made history by recording the earliest post-explosion detection of a Type Ia supernova, using cosmological models developed at Berkeley Lab and supercomputing resources at NERSC. Read More »
X-Ray Crystallography Goes Even Tinier
Supported by high-performance computing resources at NERSC, scientists at Berkeley Lab have debuted a new form of X-ray crystallography for small molecules not previously conducive to investigation with crystallography. Read More »
Fire and Ice: How Arctic Sea Ice Influences Western U.S. Wildfires
New research from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory describes how climate conditions in one part of the world can, over time, influence climate outcomes thousands of kilometers away. Simulations run on Cori helped confirm this link Read More »
Perlmutter-Powered Deep-Learning Model Speeds Extreme Weather Predictions
Researchers from Berkeley Lab, Caltech, and NVIDIA trained the Fourier Neural Operator deep learning model to emulate atmospheric dynamics and provide high-fidelity extreme weather predictions across the globe a full five days in advance. Read More »
NERSC Targets Exascale with Perlmutter and the Exascale Science Applications Program
With an eye toward the first generation of exascale computing, in 2021 NERSC unveiled its newest supercomputer, Perlmutter. To ensure that users can readily utilize this next-generation technology, NERSC has been working with development teams to prepare codes for Perlmutter and the coming exascale systems through NESAP. Read More »
NERSC Resources Power Advances in Solar Cell Efficiency
The steady improvement in silicon-based solar cells has made them cost competitive with fossil fuel sources, and additional advances in their efficiency will make them even more attractive. New materials such as hybrid perovskites are poised to give solar-cell efficiency a boost, and research being conducted at NERSC is helping to pick up the pace. Read More »
Project Jupyter: A Computer Code that Transformed Science
As Project Jupyter becomes an increasingly important tool for data science, HPC sites around the world are responding to the demand by looking for ways to effectively support them. And NERSC has been at the forefront of this effort. Read More »
Study of Harvey Flooding Aids in Quantifying Climate Change
How much do the effects of climate change contribute to extreme weather events? A new study investigated the question for one particular element of one significant storm: Hurricane Harvey. Read More »
Limit global warming to 1.5°C and halve the land ice contribution to sea level this century
A new study predicts that sea-level rise could be halved this century (from today to 2100) if we meet the Paris Agreement target of limiting global warming to 1.5°C. This work combines nearly 900 simulations, including some of Berkeley Lab Computational Scientist Dan Martin's BISICLES models of Antarctic ice sheets. Read More »
NERSC and ESnet Take Scientific Data Collaboration to the Next Level
When the Dark Energy Science Collaboration needed a fast, secure, and convenient way to share large data sets with scientists outside of the collaboration, they turned to Berkeley Lab Computing Sciences for help, ultimately choosing an innovative data-sharing solution: the Modern Research Data Portal. Read More »
Designing Selective Membranes for Batteries Using a Drug Discovery Toolbox
Researchers have designed a polymer membrane with molecular cages built into its pores that could allow high-voltage battery cells to operate at higher power and more efficiently, important factors for both electric vehicles and aircraft. Read More »
NERSC Aids PPPL in Plasma Rocket Breakthrough
A revolutionary new rocket engine design has come out of Princeton University, with an assist from the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Read More »
How Urbanization and Pollution Increase Storm Activity Around Cities
Using NERSC’s Cori system, PNNL researchers modeled the effects of urban land and aerosols on storm patterns in two major U.S. cities. Read More »
HPC Explorations of Supernova Explosions Help Physicists Reach New Milestones
For more than 60 years, physicists have been studying the question of how supernova explosions occur. Thanks to the increasing power of supercomputing resources such as those at NERSC, they’re moving ever closer to an answer. Read More »
Superfacility Model Brings COVID Research Into Real Time
Researchers at NERSC and the Linac Coherent Light Source at SLAC are collaborating to leverage the superfacility model for real-time data analysis in the worldwide quest to decipher the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Read More »
Novel Data Processing Technique Aids XFEL Protein Structure Analysis
Scientists use X-ray crystallography to determine the three-dimensional structures of proteins. A new data processing approach is enhancing the outcomes. Read More »
Measurements of Pulsar Accelerations Reveal Milky Way’s Dark Side
It is well known that the expansion of the universe is accelerating due to a mysterious dark energy. Within galaxies, stars also experience an acceleration, though this is due to some combination of dark matter and stellar density. Researchers using NERSC supercomputers have obtained the first direct measurement of the average acceleration taking place within our home galaxy, the Milky Way. Read More »
Novel Calculation Sheds New Light on Matter/Anti-Matter Mystery
An international collaboration of theoretical physicists has published a novel calculation that provides new insights into the relationship between matter and antimatter in the universe. This work included extensive use of NERSC supercomputing resources over six years. Read More »
Deep-Learning Research Nominated for Best Student Paper Award at SC20
A paper describing MeshfreeFlowNet — an open-source, physics-constrained, deep-learning approach for simultaneously enhancing the spatial and temporal resolution of scientific data — is a finalist for the Best Student Paper Award at SC20.“MeshfreeFlowNet is a big step forward in terms of physics-constrained machine learning algorithm development, combining important criteria necessary for scientific data: physics-based partial differential equation constraints, a mesh-free design that… Read More »
NERSC Supports COVID-19 Pandemic Response
Since April 2020, NERSC has allotted 2.5 million node hours on its Cori supercomputer and has provided dedicated HPC staff liaisons and other resources to support COVID-19 research. Read More »
Physical Scientists Turn to Deep Learning to Improve Earth Systems Modeling
The role of deep learning in science is at a turning point, with weather, climate, and Earth systems modeling emerging as an exciting application area for physics-informed deep learning. In this Q&A, NERSC's Karthik Kashinath discusses what is driving the scientific community to embrace these new methodologies. Read More »
NERSC Resources Play Key Role in CUPID-Mo Collaboration
Nuclear physicists affiliated with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) played a leading role in analyzing data for a demonstration experiment that has achieved record precision for a specialized detector material. The data-analysis component of this ground-breaking research was conducted entirely at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), a DOE Office of Science user facility located at Berkeley Lab. Read More »
Spectacular ultraviolet flash may finally explain how white dwarfs explode
For just the second time ever, astrophysicists have spotted a spectacular flash of ultraviolet light in a supernova, an extremely rare event following a white dwarf explosion. Read More »
Supercomputing Pipeline Aids DESI’s Quest to Create 3D Map of the Universe
The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument is combining high-speed automation, high-performance computing, and high-speed networking to produce the largest 3D map of the universe ever created. Starting in late 2020, DESI's five-year mission is to capture light from 35 million galaxies and 2.4 million quasars and transmit that data to NERSC - DESI’s primary computing center - for data processing and analysis. Read More »
Making Quantum ‘Waves’ in Ultrathin Materials
Running calculations at NERSC, a team of researchers co-led by Berkeley Lab have revealed how wavelike plasmons could power up a new class of sensing and photochemical technologies at the nanoscale. Read More »
Machine Learning Could Provide Unexpected Scientific Insights into COVID-19
A new text-mining tool developed at Berkeley Lab and supported by NERSC supercomputing resources is using natural language processing techniques that could yield unexpected scientific insights into COVID-19. Read More »
World's First 3D Simulations of Superluminous Supernovae
For the first time ever, an international team of astrophysicists simulated the 3D physics of superluminous supernovae—which are about a hundred times more luminous than typical supernovae—with NERSC supercomputers and the CASTRO code. Read More »
Harnessing the Power of Exascale for Wind Turbine Simulations
ExaWind, a DOE Exascale Computing Project, is developing new simulation capabilities to more accurately predict the complex flow physics of wind farms, and Berkeley Lab is bringing its adaptive mesh refinement expertise to the project to help make this happen. Read More »
NERSC’s Scientific Computing Power Steps into Coronavirus Battle
Researchers from the City of Hope’s Beckman Research Institute and the Translational Genomics Research Institute will use NERSC computing resources to help battle the COVID-19 global pandemic. Read More »
Earlier Spring Foliage Brings Warmer Air to the North
A group of researchers used NERSC to explore how early leaf growth, or “leaf-out,” affects the earth’s ecosystem. Their findings show that early spring leaf-out is causing a definitive increase in annual surface warming in the Northern Hemisphere. Read More »
Berkeley Lab Collaborates to Prepare Photovoltaic Materials Research for Exascale
NERSC and CRD researchers are part of a collaboration that is using BerkeleyGW software to enhance the search for new, more efficient photovoltaic solar cell materials on the first exascale computers. Read More »
NOAA Releases Extended Version of 20th Century Reanalysis Project
Calling it a time machine for weather data and a treasure trove for climate researchers, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has released an updated version of the 20th Century Reanalysis Project (20CRv3) - a high-resolution, four-dimensional reconstruction of the global climate that estimates what the weather was every day back to 1806.The release of this latest 20CRv3 data comes on the heels of an October 2019 release of data going back to 1836. Together these new… Read More »
Deep Learning Expands Study of Nuclear Waste Remediation
A research collaboration between Berkeley Lab, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Brown University, and NVIDIA has achieved exaflop performance with a deep learning application used to model subsurface flow in the study of nuclear waste remediation. Read More »
NERSC Powers Research on Post-Wildfire Water Availability
Scientists at Berkeley Lab recently took a closer look at how wildfires affect California’s watersheds. Computer simulations run at NERSC allowed them to identify the regions in the watershed that were most sensitive to wildfire conditions, as well as the hydrologic processes that are most affected. Read More »
NERSC Resources Help PPPL Team Predict Plasma Pressure in Future Fusion Facilities
Researchers at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory have developed new insights into the physics governing the balance of pressure in the scrape-off layer, the thin strip of gas at the edge of the plasma in a tokamak reactor. Read More »
Hydrogen a Culprit in Capacity Loss of Sodium-Ion Batteries
Using NERSC's Cori system, UC Santa Barbara computational materials scientist Chris Van de Walle and colleagues have uncovered a reason for the loss of capacity that occurs over time in sodium batteries. Read More »
Berkeley Lab Deep Learning Expertise Draws Attention at International Climatology Meeting
Berkeley Lab’s growing expertise in applying machine learning methods to extreme weather event studies led to invitations to present at the 2019 International Meeting on Statistical Climatology, a prestigious event held only every three years. Read More »
Scientists Piece Together the Largest U.S.-Based Dark Matter Experiment
Most of the remaining components needed to fully assemble an underground dark matter-search experiment called LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) arrived at the project’s South Dakota home during a rush of deliveries in June. Once it is up and running, data captured by the detectors’ electronics will ultimately be transferred to NERSC, LZ’s primary data center, via ESnet. Read More »
Three Sky Surveys Completed in Preparation for Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument
It took three sky surveys – conducted at telescopes in two continents, covering one-third of the visible sky, and requiring almost 1,000 observing nights – to prepare for a new project that will create the largest 3D map of the universe’s galaxies and glean new insights about the universe’s accelerating expansion. Read More »
NERSC’s Cori System Reveals Integral Role of Gluons in Proton Pressure Distribution
For the first time, lattice quantum chromodynamics calculations run at NERSC allowed nuclear physicists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to determine the pressure distribution inside a proton, taking into account the contributions of the proton’s fundamental particles: quarks and gluons. Read More »
Cleaning Cosmic Microwave Background Data to Measure Gravitational Lensing
Gravity from distant galaxies cause tiny distortions in cosmic microwave background temperature maps - a process called gravitational lensing - which are detected by data analysis software run on supercomputers like the Cori system at NERSC. Unfortunately, this temperature data is often corrupted by foreground emissions from extragalactic dust, gas, and other noise sources that are challenging to model. So Berkeley Lab researchers developed a statistical method for analyzing CMB data that is largely immune to the foreground noise effects. Read More »
CosmoGAN: Training a Neural Network to Study Dark Matter
A Berkeley Lab-led research group is using a deep learning method known as generative adversarial networks to enhance the use of gravitational lensing in the study of dark matter. Read More »
Superfacility Framework Advances Photosynthesis Research
Researchers have long studied PSII, a protein complex in green plants, algae, and cyanobacteria that plays a crucial role in photosynthesis. Their understanding of this three-billion-year-old biological system is now moving more quickly, thanks to an integrated superfacility framework established between LCLS, ESnet, and NERSC. Read More »
A Breakthrough in the Study of Laser/Plasma Interactions
A new 3D particle-in-cell simulation tool developed by researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and CEA Saclay is enabling cutting-edge simulations of laser/plasma coupling mechanisms that were previously out of reach of standard PIC codes used in plasma research. Read More »
2019 DOE Performance Portability Meeting Breaks New Ground
The 2019 DOE Performance, Portability, and Productivity Annual Meeting once again brought together representatives from national labs, academia, and the vendor community to share ideas, progress, and challenges in achieving performance portability across DOE’s current and future supercomputers. Read More »
Searching for Photocathodes that Convert CO2 into Fuels
As scientists search for new materials to enable the photocatalytic conversion of CO2, a Berkeley Lab team used supercomputing resources at NERSC to perform a massive photocathode search, starting with 68,860 materials and screening them for specific intrinsic properties. Read More »
When Stars Collide: 3D Computer Simulation Captures Cosmic Event
The aftermath of the collision of two neutron stars has been fully captured in a 3D computer model for the first time, thanks to research by University of Alberta astrophysicist Rodrigo Fernández and an international team. Read More »
Revealing Reclusive Recombination Mechanisms in Solar Cell Materials
Researchers at UCSB used NERSC supercomputers to better understand key mechanisms behind the solar conversion efficiencies of hybrid perovskites, which could make these materials even more attractive for photovoltaics. Read More »
Shedding New Light on Luminous Blue Variable Stars
Three-dimensional simulations run at NERSC, Argonne and NASA have provided new insights into the behavior of a unique class of celestial bodies known as luminous blue variables - rare, massive stars that can shine up to a million times brighter than the Sun. Read More »
Simulations Run at NERSC Confirm Thermal and Electrical Properties of Superionic Crystals
Using a combination of experiments and simulations, materials scientists at Duke University, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Argonne National Laboratory have sussed out the physical phenomenon underlying the promising electrical and thermal properties of a class of materials called superionic crystals. Read More »
Berkeley Lab, Oak Ridge, NVIDIA Team Breaks Exaop Barrier With Deep Learning Application
A team of computational scientists from Berkeley Lab and Oak Ridge National Laboratory and engineers from NVIDIA has, for the first time, demonstrated an exascale-class deep learning application that has broken the exaop barrier. Read More »
HP-CONCORD Paves the Way for Scalable Machine Learning in HPC
A team of Berkeley Lab researchers has demonstrated how a new parallel algorithm called HP-CONCORD can help address some of the most challenging problems in data-driven science. Read More »
NERSC, Intel, Cray Harness the Power of Deep Learning to Better Understand the Universe
A Big Data Center collaboration between computational scientists at NERSC and engineers at Intel and Cray has yielded another first in the quest to apply deep learning to data-intensive science: CosmoFlow, the first large-scale science application to use the TensorFlow framework on a CPU-based high performance computing platform with synchronous training. Read More »
Topology, Physics & Machine Learning Take on Climate Research Data Challenges
Two PhD students who first came to Berkeley Lab as summer interns in 2016 are spending six months a year at the lab through 2020 developing new data analytics tools that could dramatically impact climate research and other large-scale science data projects. Read More »
Berkeley Lab Researchers Showcase Deep Learning for High Energy Physics at CHEP
Steve Farrell, a machine-learning engineer who recently joined NERSC, gave an overview of Berkeley Lab’s expanding expertise in deep learning for science during a plenary talk at the 2018 CHEP conference in July. Read More »
Batteries Get a Boost from ‘Pickled’ Electrolytes
Battery researchers at Argonne National Laboratory used computer simulations to help reveal the mechanism behind a common additive known to extend the life of lithium-ion batteries. Read More »
Berkeley Lab-Developed Digital Library is a Game Changer for Environmental Research
Developed by Berkeley Lab, NERSC and NCEAS researchers, ESS-DIVE is a new digital archive that serves as a repository for hundreds of U.S. Department of Energy-funded research projects under the agency’s Environmental System Science umbrella. Read More »
IceCube Neutrinos Point to Long-Sought Cosmic Ray Accelerator
An international team of scientists has found the first evidence of a source of high-energy cosmic neutrinos, ghostly subatomic particles that can travel unhindered for billions of light years from the most extreme environments in the universe to Earth. Read More »
NOvA experiment sees strong evidence for antineutrino oscillation
The Fermilab NOvA neutrino experiment announced that it has seen strong evidence of muon antineutrinos oscillating into electron antineutrinos over long distances, a phenomenon that has never been unambiguously observed. Image: Sandbox Studio Read More »
New Simulations Break Down Potential Impact of a Major Quake by Building Location and Size
A team of Berkeley Lab and LLNL researchers is leveraging powerful supercomputers at NERSC to portray the impact of high-frequency ground motion on thousands of representative different-sized buildings spread out across the California region. Read More »
Berkeley Researchers Use Machine Learning to Search Science Data
Science Search, a web-based search engine for scientific data is currently being developed by a team of researchers in Berkeley Lab's CRD and NERSC. The team is also developing innovative machine learning tools to pull contextual information from scientific datasets and automatically generate missing metadata tags for each file. As a proof-of-concept, the team is working with staff at the Molecular Foundry, to demonstrate the concepts of Science Search on the images captured by the facility's instruments. Read More »
Self-Healing Cement Could Be a Boon to Oil & Gas Industry
Researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have developed a unique cement that can repair itself in as little as a few hours; simulations run at NERSC helped them understand how it works. Read More »
Quarterbacking Catalysts by Positioning Atoms
Materials science researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory used experiments involving graphene, along with calculations run at NERSC, to better understand how oxygen atoms bind with graphene and turn graphene into a unique catalytic support. Read More »
Tiny Distortions Reveal Clearer Picture of Strands in Cosmic Web
Scientists have decoded faint distortions in the patterns of the universe’s earliest light to map huge tubelike structures invisible to our eyes – known as filaments – that serve as superhighways for delivering matter to dense hubs such as galaxy clusters. Read More »
Deep Learning at 15 PFlops Enables Training for Extreme Weather Identification at Scale
Petaflop per second deep learning training performance on the Cori supercomputer at NERSC has given climate scientists the ability to use machine learning to identify extreme weather events in huge climate simulation datasets. Read More »
Underground Neutrino Experiment Could Provide Greater Clarity on Matter-Antimatter Imbalance
A new underground neutrino experiment could provide greater clarity on matter-antimatter imbalance in the Cosmos. And NERSC will be the principal site for data processing and analyses throughout the course of the experiment. Read More »
NERSC Supercomputers Help Researchers Create Reference Catalog for Rumen Microbiome
Using supercomputers at NERSC, an international team led by William Kelly, formerly at AgResearch New Zealand’s Grasslands Research Centre, and including scientists at the Joint Genome Institute generated a reference catalog of rumen microbial genomes and isolates cultivated and sequenced from the Hungate1000 collection. Read More »
A Game Changer: Metagenomic Clustering Powered by HPC
A team of researchers from Berkeley Lab's CRD and JGI took one of the most popular clustering approaches in modern biology—the Markov Clustering algorithm—and modified it to run quickly, efficiently and at scale on distributed-memory supercomputers. Read More »
Can Strongly Lensed Type Ia Supernovae Resolve One of Cosmology’s Biggest Controversies?
Using the SciDAC developed SEDONA code and NERSC supercomputers, astrophysicists at Berkeley Lab and the University of Portsmouth discovered how to control the effects of "micolensing." Armed with this knowledge they believe they will be able to find 1000 strongly lensed Type Ia supernovae in real-time from LSST data--that's 20 times more than previous expectations. Read More »
The Atomic Dynamics of Rare Magneto-Electric Matter
By ricocheting neutrons off the atoms of yttrium manganite (YMnO3) heated to 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit, researchers have discovered the atomic mechanisms that give the unusual material its rare electromagnetic properties. Their work included quantum simulations run at NERSC. Read More »
Physics Data Processing at NERSC Dramatically Cuts Reconstruction Time
In a recent demonstration project, physicists from Brookhaven National Laboratory and Berkeley Lab used the Cori supercomputer to reconstruct data collected from a nuclear physics experiment, an advance that could dramatically reduce the time it takes to make detailed data available for scientific discoveries. Read More »
Delivering Efficient Parallel I/O with HDF5 on Exascale Computing Systems
In an interview with Department of Energy's ECP communications team, Berkeley Lab's Suren Byna and Quincey Koziol talk about delivering efficient parallel I/O with HDF5 on exascale computing systems. Read More »
Berkeley Lab Physicists Apply Machine Learning to the Universe’s Mysteries
Berkeley Lab physicists and their collaborators have demonstrated that computers are ready to tackle the universe’s greatest mysteries – they used neural networks to perform a deep dive into data simulating the subatomic particle soup that may have existed just microseconds after the big bang. Read More »
Charting a New Course in Organic Solar Cell Design
Scientists have pinpointed the source of an ultrafast and efficient process that spawns several carriers of electrical charge from a single particle of light in organic crystals that are integral to this increasingly popular form of solar cells. Read More »
Coupling Experiments to Theory to Build a Better Battery
A research team led by Berkeley Lab found that a new lithium-sulfur battery component allows a doubling in capacity compared to a conventional lithium-sulfur battery. Read More »
The Blob that Ate the Tokamak
Scientists at Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory used NERSC resources to create new simulations that could provide insight into how blobs (bubbles) at the plasma edge in a tokamak reactor behave. Read More »
Creating a World of Make-Believe to Better Understand the Real Universe
Seeing is believing, or so the saying goes.And in some cases, a world of make-believe can help you realize what you’re actually seeing, too.Scientists are creating simulated universes, for example – complete with dark matter mock-ups, computer-generated galaxies, quasi quasars, and pseudo supernovae – to better understand real-world observations.Their aim is to envision how new Earth-based and space-based sky surveys will see the universe, and to help analyze and interpret the vast… Read More »
Heavy Metal: How First Supernovae Altered Early Star Formation
An international team of researchers ran multi-scale, multi-physics 2D and 3D simulations at NERSC to illustrate how heavy metals expelled from exploding supernovae helped the first stars in the universe regulate subsequent star formation and influence the appearance of galaxies in the process. Read More »
High-Performance Computing Cuts Particle Collision Data Prep Time
For the first time, scientists have used high-performance computing to reconstruct the data collected by a nuclear physics experiment—an advance that could dramatically reduce the time it takes to make detailed data available for scientific discoveries. Read More »
NERSC Resources Help Predict New Material for High-Power, High-Efficiency LEDs
Using predictive atomistic calculations and high-performance supercomputers at NERSC, University of Michigan researchers found that incorporating the element boron into the widely used InGaN (indium-gallium nitride) material can keep electrons from becoming too crowded in LEDs, making the material more efficient at producing light. Read More »
Detailed View of Immune Proteins Could Lead to New Pathogen-Defense Strategies
Researchers at Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley used cryo-electron microscopy to capture a high-resolution image of a protein ring called an “inflammasome” as it was bound to flagellin, providing new insight into potential strategies for protection from pathogens. Read More »
Deep Learning for Science: A Q&A with NERSC’s Prabhat
In this Q&A with Prabhat, who leads the Data and Analytics Services Group at NERSC and has been instrumental in several projects exploring opportunities for deep learning in science, he talks about the history of deep learning and machine learning and the unique challenges of applying these data analytics tools to science. Read More »
The Mystery of the Star That Wouldn’t Die
Supercomputers at NERSC helped an international team of scientists decipher one of the most bizarre spectacles ever seen in the night sky: A supernova that refused to stop shining, remaining bright far longer than an ordinary stellar explosion. What caused the event is puzzling. Read More »
Solving a Magnesium Mystery in Rechargeable Battery Performance
Simulations run at NERSC helped a research team at the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research discover a surprising set of chemical reactions involving magnesium that degrade battery performance even before the battery can be charged up. Read More »
Scientists Decode the Origin of Universe’s Heavy Elements in the Light from a Neutron Star Merger
Scientists have obtained the first measurement of the merger of two neutron stars and its explosive aftermath. Computer simulations at NERSC were critical for understanding the event, which could provide valuable insights into the origin of universe’s heavy elements. Read More »
Assessing Regional Earthquake Risk and Hazards in the Age of Exascale
Researchers from Berkeley Lab, Lawrence Livermore Lab and UC Davis are using supercomputers at NERSC to build the first-ever end-to-end simulation code to precisely capture the geology and physics of regional earthquakes, and how the shaking impacts buildings. Read More »
A TOAST for Next Generation CMB Experiments
Computational cosmologists at Berkeley Lab they recently achieved a critical milestone in preparation for upcoming CMB experiments: scaling their data simulation and reduction framework TOAST to run on all 658,784 Intel Knights Landing Xeon Phi processor cores on the NERSC’s Cori. The team also implemented a new TOAST module to simulate the noise introduced when ground-based telescopes look at the CMB through the atmosphere. Read More »
Multiscale Simulations Help Predict Unruly Plasma Behavior
New multiscale gyrokinetic simulations are making it easier to more accurately predict plasma behavior in a tokamak reactor. Read More »
NERSC Supercomputers Help Berkeley Lab Scientists Map Key DNA Protein Complex
Using cryo-electron microscopy and supercomputing resources at NERSC, Berkeley Lab scientists have obtained 3-D models of a human transcription factor at near-atomic resolutions. Read More »
A First: Trapping Noble Gases in 2D Porous Structures at Room Temp
A materials science breakthrough at the nanoscale could lead to better methods for capturing noble gases, such as radioactive krypton and xenon generated by nuclear power plants. Read More »
Simulations Show How Recycled Atoms Boost Plasma Turbulence
Using NERSC's Edison supercomputer, physicists at Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory have modeled how recycled neutral atoms, which arise when hot plasma strikes a tokamak fusion reactor’s walls, increase plasma turbulence driven by what is called the “ion temperature gradient.” Read More »
New Simulations Could Help in Hunt for Massive Mergers of Neutron Stars, Black Holes
Working with an international team, Berkeley Lab scientists have developed new computer models to explore what happens when a black hole joins with a neutron star – the superdense remnant of an exploded star. Read More »
'Hindcasting' Study Investigates the Extreme 2013 Colorado Flood
Using a publicly available climate model, Berkeley Lab researchers “hindcast” the conditions that led to the Sept. 9-16, 2013 flooding around Boulder, Colo. and found that climate change attributed to human activity made the storm much more severe than would otherwise have occurred. Read More »
Record-setting Seismic Simulations Run on NERSC’s Cori System
Record-setting seismic simulations run earlier this year on the Cori supercomputer at NERSC were the subject of two presentations at the ISC High Performance conference in Frankfurt, Germany this week. Read More »
Simulations Pinpoint Atomic-level Defects in Solar Cell Nanostructures
Heterogeneous nanostructured materials are widely used in various optoelectronic devices, including solar cells. However, the nano-interfaces contain structural defects that can affect the performance of optoelectronic devices. Running calculations at NERSC, researchers found the root cause of the defects in two materials and provided design rules to avoid them. Read More »
