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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 »
Record-breaking 45-qubit Quantum Computing Simulation Run at NERSC on Cori
Researchers from ETH Zurich in Switzerland used the Cori supercomputer at NERSC to simulate a 45-qubit circuit, the largest simulation of a quantum computer ever achieved. Read More »
HPC4Mfg Paper Manufacturing Project Yields First Results
Simulations run at NERSC as part of a unique collaboration comprising Berkeley Lab, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and an industry consortium could help U.S. paper manufacturers significantly reduce production costs and increase energy efficiencies. Read More »
Roofline Model Boosts Manycore Code Optimization Efforts
A software toolkit developed in Berkeley Lab's Computational Research Division to better understand supercomputer performance is now being used to boost application performance for researchers running codes at NERSC and other supercomputing facilities. Read More »
Rare Supernova Discovery Ushers in New Era for Cosmology
With the help of an automated supernova-hunting pipeline based at NERSC, astronomers have captured multiple images of a gravitationally lensed Type 1a supernova and its host galaxy. This detection is currently the only one of its kind, but astronomers believe that if they can find more they may be able to measure the rate of the Universe’s expansion within four percent accuracy. Read More »
Berkeley Lab Researchers Make NWChem’s Planewave “Purr” on Intel’s Knights Landing Architectures
Berkeley Lab researchers have successfully added thread-level parallelism on top of MPI-level parallelism in the planewave density functional theory method within the popular software suite NWChem. An important step to ensuring that computational chemists are prepared to compute efficiently on next-generation exascale machines. Read More »
Towards Super-Efficient, Ultra-Thin Silicon Solar Cells
Ames Laboratory researchers are developing a highly absorbing ultra-thin crystalline silicon solar cell architecture with enhanced light-trapping capabilities. Read More »
Machine Learning Algorithms Enhance Predictive Modeling of 2D Materials
Researchers from Argonne National Laboratory, using supercomputers at NERSC, are employing machine learning algorithms to accurately predict the physical, chemical and mechanical properties of nanomaterials, reducing the time it takes to yield such predictions from years to months—in some cases even weeks. Read More »
Researchers Catch Extreme Waves with High-Resolution Modeling
Using decades of global climate data generated at a spatial resolution of about 25 kilometers squared, Berkeley Lab researchers were able to capture the formation of tropical cyclones, also referred to as hurricanes and typhoons, and the extreme waves that they generate. Read More »
Machine Learning Accurately Predicts Metallic Defects
Using NERSC supercomputers, Berkeley Lab researchers built and trained machine learning algorithms to predict defect behavior in certain intermetallic compounds with high accuracy. This method will accelerate research of new advanced alloys and lightweight new materials for applications spanning automotive to aerospace and much more. Read More »
Simulations Reveal Invisible Chaos of Superluminous Supernovae
To better understand the physical conditions that create superluminious supernova, astrophysicists are running 2D simulations of these events using supercomputers at NERSC and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) developed CASTRO code. Read More »
Diamond Shines in Molecular Dynamics Simulations
For centuries diamonds have been revered for their strength, beauty, value and utility. Now a team of researchers from Argonne National Laboratory, running molecular dynamics calculations at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility and NERSC, are finding additional reasons to celebrate this complex material—and it has nothing to do with color, cut or clarity. Read More »
Simulations Confirm Observations of 2015 India/Pakistan Heat Waves
A paper published December 15 during the American Geophysical Union (AGU) fall meeting in San Francisco points to new evidence of human influence on extreme weather events. Three researchers from Berkeley Lab are among the co-authors on the paper, "The Deadly Combination of Heat and Humidity in India and Pakistan in Summer 2015," which examined observational and simulated temperature and heat indexes and concluded that the two separate heat waves "were exacerbated by anthropogenic climate change." Read More »
Supercomputers Help ID New Drug Leads to Fight Heart Disease
Using a unique computational approach to rapidly sample proteins in their natural state of gyrating, bobbing and weaving, researchers have identified promising drug leads that may selectively combat heart disease. Read More »
Global Brain Initiatives Generate Tsunami of Neuroscience Data
Around the world, various 'Brain Initiatives' are generating a tsunami of neuroscience data. But without a coherent strategy to analyze, manage and understand the data, advancements in the field will be limited. That's why Berkeley Lab's Kristofer Bouchard assembled an international team of interdisciplinary researchers, including NERSC staff, to overcome the big data challenge. Read More »
Multiscale HPC Captures Photovoltaics at the Nanoscale
Advances in ultrafast spectroscopy experiments and high performance computing are revolutionizing the scientific community’s ability to study the physical processes that occur in solar cells at short length and time scales. Read More »
The Incredible Shrinking Particle Accelerator
WarpIV, a new data analysis/visualization toolkit developed at Berkeley Lab, is designed to help speed particle accelerator research and design by enabling in situ visualization and analysis of accelerator simulations at scale. Read More »
Researchers use Edison to Improve Performance, Energy Efficiency of Bioinformatics Application
A team of computer scientists and geneticists from Iowa State University, the University of Maryland and the University of Arkansas have demonstrated significant speedups of the epiSNP bioinformatics program using the Edison supercomputer at NERSC. Read More »
Unveiled: Earth’s Viral Diversity
Researchers from the Joint Genome Institute utilized the largest collection of assembled metagenomic datasets from around the world to uncover over 125,000 partial and complete viral genomes. Read More »
Toward Cost-Effective Polymer Electrolyte Fuel Cells
A research team running density functional theory calculations at Berkeley Lab's NERSC center has demonstrated how polymer electrolyte fuel cells—long favored for transportation applications—can be made to run more efficiently and produced more cost-effectively by reducing the amount of a single key ingredient: platinum. Read More »
World’s Most Sensitive Dark Matter Detector Completes Search
The Large Underground Xenon (LUX) dark matter experiment, which operates beneath a mile of rock at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in the Black Hills of South Dakota, has completed its search for the missing matter of the universe. Read More »
Supercomputers Help Identify Efficiency-Limiting Defects in LEDs
Using state-of-the-art theoretical methods, researchers at the University of California Santa Barbara have identified a class of point defects that act as sites for nonradiative recombination and can explain the observed reduction in efficiency of nitride-based light emitting diodes. Read More »
A Peek Inside the Earliest Moments of the Universe
Researchers from the NPLQCD Collaboration used LQCD calculations to better understand the big bang nucleosynthesis process, which occurred in the first few minutes following the Big Bang, and precisely measure the nuclear reaction rate that occurs when a neutron and proton form a deuteron. Read More »
Cryo-EM’s Renaissance
In a pair of breakthrough Nature papers published last month, researchers in Eva Nogales’ Lab at UC Berkeley mapped two important protein functions in unprecedented detail. And they used supercomputers at NERSC to process and analyze the data. Read More »
Models Help Pinpoint Material for Better Nuclear Fuel Recycling
A team of computational scientists sifted 125,000 molecules to pinpoint one ideal for separating some radioactive gases from spent nuclear fuel, then another team synthesized and tested it. Read More »
New Mathematics Accurately Captures Liquids and Surfaces Moving in Synergy
Berkeley Lab researchers in the Computing Sciences Division have developed a new mathematical framework that allows researchers to capture fluid dynamics at unprecedented detail. The work could be used in a range of applications, like optimizing the shape of a propeller blade and the ejection of ink droplets in printers. Read More »
Materials Project Releases Massive Trove of Battery and Molecule Data
The Materials Project, a Google-like database of material properties aimed at accelerating innovation, has released yet another trove of data to the public that will help researchers working on batteries. Read More »
New Path Forward for Next-Generation Lithium-Ion Batteries
Using supercomputers at NERSC, researchers report a major advance in understanding how oxygen oxidation creates extra capacity “lithium-rich” cathodes, opening the door to batteries with far higher energy density, meaning your phone or electric vehicle will be able to run for much longer between charges. Read More »
Warm Dense Crystallography: Digging Deeper into WDM
Researchers from the University of Washington are using NERSC supercomputers and data from X-ray free-electron laser experiments to gain new insights into warm dense matter (WDM), one of the most challenging aspects of contemporary plasma physics. Read More »
Could Aluminum Nitride Produce Quantum Bits?
The leading method for creating quantum bits, or qubits, currently involves exploiting the structural defects in diamonds. But using NERSC resources, University of Chicago researchers found that the same defect could be engineered in cheaper aluminum nitride. If confirmed by experiments, this could significantly reduce the cost of manufacturing quantum technologies. Read More »
2D 'Flat' Boron Yields a Superconducting Surprise
Density functional theory simulations run at NERSC helped Rice University researchers determine that two-dimensional boron is a natural low-temperature superconductor. Read More »
NERSC Resources Help Find Roots of MJO Modeling Mismatches
Researchers from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory are using field data and NERSC supercomputers to better model how the Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO) operates and gain new insights into the impact of a warming climate on the MJO. Read More »
Could Material Defects Actually Improve Solar Cells?
Scientists at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory are using supercomputers to study what may seem paradoxical: certain defects in silicon solar cells may actually improve their performance. Read More »
Multi-Scale Simulations Solve a Plasma Turbulence Mystery
Cutting-edge simulations run at NERSC over a two-year period are helping physicists better understand what influences the behavior of the plasma turbulence that is driven by the intense heating necessary to create fusion energy. Read More »
Updated Workflows Enhance New LHC Era
Researchers working on ATLAS, one of the Large Hadron Collider’s largest experiments, are using updated workflow management tools developed primarily by Berkeley Lab researchers to help sift through the increasingly large datasets being generated by the experimental facility. Read More »
Seeing the Big Picture in Photosynthetic Light Harvesting
To understand what goes on inside a beehive, you can’t just study the activity of a single bee. Likewise, to understand the photosynthetic light harvesting that takes place inside the chloroplast of a leaf, you can’t just study the activity of a single antenna protein. So researchers with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California (UC) Berkeley created the first computational model that simulates the light-harvesting activity of the thousands of antenna proteins… Read More »
Supernova Twins: Making Standard Candles More Standard Than Ever
By employing a new modeling method, members of the international Nearby Supernova Factory based at Berkeley Lab were able to dramatically reduce the scatter in supernova brightnesses. Read More »
Physicists ID Mechanism that Stabilizes Plasma in Tokamaks
A team of physicists has discovered a mechanism that prevents the electrical current flowing through fusion plasma from repeatedly peaking and crashing, which can cause instabilities within the plasma's core. Read More »
World’s Most Sensitive Dark Matter Detector Gets an Upgrade
The Large Underground Xenon (LUX) dark matter experiment, which operates nearly a mile underground at the Sanford Underground Research Facility, has already proven to be the most sensitive detector in the hunt for dark matter. Now, a new set of calibration techniques employed by LUX scientists has again dramatically improved the detector’s sensitivity. Read More »
NERSC, Berkeley Lab Explore Frontiers of Deep Learning for Science
A collaborative effort at Berkeley Lab is applying deep learning software tools developed for supercomputing environments to “grand challenge” science problems running computations at NERSC. Read More »
Supercomputers Speed Search for New Subatomic Particles
A team of theoretical high-energy physicists in the Fermilab Lattice and MILC Collaborations has published a new high-precision calculation that could significantly advance the indirect search for physics beyond the Standard Model. The calculation applies to a particularly rare decay of the B meson (a subatomic particle), which is sometimes also called a “penguin decay” process. Read More »
‘Sidecars’ Pave the Way for Concurrent Analytics of Large-Scale Simulations
A new software tool developed through a multi-disciplinary collaboration at Berkeley Lab allows researchers doing large-scale simulations at the NERSC and other supercomputing facilities to do data analytics and visualizations of their simulations while the simulations are running. Read More »
New ‘Design Rule’ Paves Way for Nature-Inspired Nanostructures
Berkeley Lab researchers have discovered a design rule that enables a recently created material--peptoid nanosheets--to exist. This never-before-seen design rule could be used to piece together complex nanosheet structures and other peptoid assemblies such as nanotubes and crystalline solids. Read More »
What Causes Electron Heat Loss in Fusion Plasma?
A research team led by Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory has proposed an explanation for why the hot plasma within tokamaks sometimes fails to reach the required temperature, even as researchers pump beams of fast-moving neutral atoms into the plasma in an effort to make it hotter. Read More »
What Ignites a Neutron Star?
Supercomputers at NERSC helped set the stage for astrophysicists from Stony Brook University, Los Alamos National Laboratory and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to perform the first detailed 3D simulation of an X-ray burst. Read More »
Celeste: A New Model for Cataloging the Universe
A Berkeley Lab-based research collaboration of astrophysicists, statisticians and computer scientists has developed Celeste, a new statistical analysis model designed to enhance one of modern astronomy’s most time-tested tools: sky surveys. Read More »
CT Scan of Earth Links Mantle Plumes with Volcanic Hotspots
University of California, Berkeley, seismologists have produced for the first time a sharp, 3D scan of Earth’s interior that conclusively connects plumes of hot rock rising through the mantle with surface hotspots that generate volcanic island chains like Hawaii, Samoa and Iceland. Read More »
Ice Sheet Model Reveals Most Comprehensive Projections for West Antarctica’s Future
A new international study is the first to use a high-resolution, large-scale computer model to estimate how much ice the West Antarctic Ice Sheet could lose over the next couple of centuries, and how much that could add to sea-level rise. Read More »
Land Management Practices More Critical as Biofuels Use Grows
The handling of agricultural crop residues appears to have a large impact on soil's ability to retain carbon, making land management practices increasingly important, especially under a scenario where cellulosic materials become more heavily used as a feedstock for ethanol production, according to a study led by researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory. “Plants and soil are carbon sinks,” said Argonne climate scientist Beth Drewniak, who led the study. Read More »
Experiments ✚ Simulations = Better Nuclear Power Research
An international collaboration of physicists is working to improve the safety and economics of nuclear power by studying how various cladding materials and fuels used in reactors respond to radiation damage. Read More »
‘Data Deluge’ Pushes Mass Spec Imaging to New Heights
Researchers at Berkeley Lab are working to help the scientific community address emerging data management and analysis issues through MANTISSA (Massive Acceleration New Techniques in Science with Scalable Algorithms), a DOE-funded program that supports the development of novel algorithms that will allow new software tools in a variety of science domains to run at scale on current and next-generation supercomputers. Read More »
The Rise and Fall of Core-Collapse Supernovae
A research team from Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), University of Tennessee, Florida Atlantic University and North Carolina State University compared 3D models run at ORNL with 2D models run at NERSC to shed new light on the explosion mechanism behind core-collapse supernovae. Read More »
Unravelling the Mysteries of Carbonic Acid
Blink your eyes and it’s long gone. Carbonic acid exists for only a tiny fraction of a second when carbon dioxide gas dissolves in water before changing into a mix of protons and bicarbonate anions. Despite its short life, however, carbonic acid imparts a lasting impact on Earth’s atmosphere and geology, as well as on the human body. However, because of its short lifespan, the detailed chemistry of carbonic acid has long been veiled in mystery. Researchers with Berkeley Lab and the Univ. of… Read More »
What the Blank Makes Quantum Dots Blink?
Quantum dots (shown here dissolved in liquid under ultraviolet light) offer tantalizing prospects for new technologies if scientists can stop them blinking. (Photo by Antipoff, CC BY-SA 3.0) Quantum dots are nanoparticles of semiconductor that can be tuned to glow in a rainbow of colors. Since their discovery in the 1980s, these remarkable nanoparticles have held out tantalizing prospects for all kinds of new technologies, ranging from paint-on lighting materials and solar cells to quantum… Read More »
Spiraling Laser Pulses Could Change Nature of Graphene
A new study that involved large-scale simulations run at NERSC predicts that researchers could use spiraling pulses of laser light to change the nature of graphene, turning it from a metal into an insulator and giving it other peculiar properties that might be used to encode information. Read More »
NERSC Hosts Digital Stargazing Portal
Even non-scientists can now browse sky survey images hosted at NERSC. The DECam Legacy Survey has published the first in a series of web-based catalogs that will offer an update to images of the night sky originally taken with the 15-year-old camera of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. In the spirit of the new information age, the survey will share frequent updates on its public website. Read More »
Meraculous: Deciphering the ‘Book of Life’ With Supercomputers
A team of scientists from Berkeley Lab, JGI and UC Berkeley, simplified and sped up genome assembly, reducing a months-long process to mere minutes. This was primarily achieved by “parallelizing” the code to harness the processing power of supercomputers, such as NERSC’s Edison system. Read More »
Supernova Hunting with Supercomputers
Using a “roadmap” of theoretical calculations and supercomputer simulations performed at NERSC by Berkeley Lab’s Daniel Kasen, astronomers observed for the first time a flash of light caused by a supernova slamming into a nearby star, allowing them to determine the stellar system from which the supernova was born. This finding confirms one of two competing theories about the birth of Type Ia supernovae. Read More »
Chombo-Crunch Sinks Its Teeth into Fluid Dynamics
Berkeley Lab scientists are breaking new ground in the modeling of complex flows in energy and oil and gas applications, thanks to a computational fluid dynamics and transport code dubbed “Chombo-Crunch.” Read More »
Electrolyte Genome Could Be Battery Game-Changer
The Materials Project hosted at NERSC is taking some of the guesswork out of discovering new battery catalysts with the Electrolyte Genome. Read More »
Expanding the World’s Largest Database of Elastic Properties
Berkeley Lab scientists, using the infrastructure of the Materials Project and NERSC supercomputing resources, have calculated the complete elastic properties for 1,181 inorganic compounds. Read More »
BigNeuron: Unlocking the Secrets of the Human Brain
To find a standard 3D neuron reconstruction algorithm, BigNeuron will sponsor a series of international hackathons and workshops where contending algorithms will be ported onto a common software platform to analyze neuronal physical structure using the same core dataset. All ported algorithms will be bench-tested at NERSC, ORNL and Human Brain Project supercomputing centers.
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In Climatic Tug of War, Carbon From Thawing Permafrost Wins
New computer simulations conducted at NERSC by Berkeley Lab scientists are the first to represent permafrost processes as well as the dynamics of carbon and nitrogen in the soil. Read More »
Organic Photovoltaics Experiments Showcase ‘Superfacility’ Concept
A collaborative effort linking the Advanced Light Source at Berkeley Lab with supercomputing resources at NERSC and the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility via ESnet is yielding exciting results in organic photovoltaics research that could transform the way researchers use these facilities and improve scientific productivity in the process. Read More »
First Direct Observation of Carbon Dioxide’s Increasing Greenhouse Effect at Earth’s Surface
Researchers from Berkeley Lab have observed an increase in carbon dioxide’s (CO2) greenhouse effect at the Earth’s surface for the first time. They attributed this upward trend to rising CO2 levels from fossil fuel emissions. Read More »
New Algorithm Enables Faster Simulations of Ultrafast Processes
The algorithm opens the door for efficient real-time simulations of ultrafast processes and electron dynamics, such as excitation in photovoltaic materials and ultrafast demagnetization following an optical excitation. Read More »
What Makes Clouds Form, Grow and Die?
Until recently, computer models for simulating climate on a global scale relied on mathematical formulas to approximate how clouds were born and grew. The advent of more advanced computers has enabled researchers to explicitly simulate large-cloud systems instead of approximating them. Read More »
Pinpointing the Magnetic Moments of Nuclear Matter
Using NERSC's Edison supercomputer, a team of nuclear physicists has made a key discovery in its quest to shed light on the structure and behavior of subatomic particles. Read More »
Laser, Supercomputer Measure Speedy Electrons in Silicon
In silicon, electrons attached to atoms in the crystal lattice can be mobilized into the conduction band by light or voltage. UC Berkeley scientists used a laser to take snapshots of this very brief band-gap jump and timed it at 450 attoseconds. Read More »
A Standard for Neuroscience Data
BrainFormat, a neuroscience data standardization framework developed at Berkeley Lab, is a strong contender to contribute to a data format and storage standard for the neuroscience research community. In conjunction with this work, NERSC is also contributing to the CRCNS data-sharing portal, which will allow neuroscience researchers worldwide to easily share files without having to download any special software. Read More »
Berkeley Lab Particle Accelerator Sets World Record
Using one of the most powerful lasers in the world, Berkeley Lab researchers have accelerated subatomic particles to the highest energies ever recorded from a compact accelerator. Computer simulations run at NERSC allowed them to test the experimental setup before ever turning on the laser. Read More »
Optimized Algorithms Boost Combustion Research
Turbulent combustion simulations, which provide input to the design of more fuel-efficient combustion systems, have gotten their own efficiency boost, thanks to researchers from Berkeley Lab's Computational Research Division. Read More »
Berkeley Algorithms Help Researchers Understand Dark Energy
The process of identifying and tracking Type Ia supernovae requires scientists to scrupulously monitor the night sky for slight changes, a task that would be extremely tedious and time-consuming for the Dark Energy Survey (DES) without some novel computational tools developed at NERSC by researchers at Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley. Read More »
Supercomputers Fuel Global High-Resolution Climate Models
Not long ago, it would have taken several years to run a high-resolution simulation on a global climate model. But using supercomputing resources at NERSC, Berkeley Lab climate scientist Michael Wehner was able to complete a run in just three months. Read More »
How Atomic Vibrations Transform Vanadium Dioxide
A team led by Oak Ridge National Laboratory has made an important advancement in understanding a classic transition-metal oxide, vanadium dioxide, by quantifying the thermodynamic forces driving the transformation. Read More »
Mathematical Models Shed New Light on Cancer Mutations
Using mathematical modeling methods traditionally considered the property of statistical physics and artificial intelligence, researchers at Harvard Medical School have developed a way to identify important cancer mutations. Read More »
Using Radio Waves to Control Fusion Plasma Density
Recent fusion experiments on the DIII-D tokamak at General Atomics and the Alcator C-Mod tokamak at MIT showed that beaming microwaves into the center of the plasma can be used to control the density in the center of the plasma. Read More »
Water and Gold: A Promising Mix for Future Batteries
For the first time, researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have observed the molecular structure of liquid water at a gold surface under different charging conditions, paving the way for future studies of electrochemical interfaces that exist in current and prototype batteries. Calculations run at NERSC helped them better understand the chemistry. Read More »
Probing the Surprising Secrets of Carbonic Acid
Berkeley Lab researchers used the Advanced Light Source and NERSC to gain valuable new insights into carbonic acid, with important implications for both geological and biological concerns. Read More »
Supercomputer Helps Model 3D Map of Adolescent Universe
Using extremely faint light from galaxies 10.8 billion light years away, scientists have created one of the most complete, three-dimensional maps of a slice of the adolescent universe—just 3 billion years after the Big Bang. Read More »
Dispelling a Misconception About Mg-Ion Batteries
A series of computer simulations run at NERSC has dispelled a long-standing misconception about magnesium-ions in the electrolyte that transports the ions between a battery’s electrodes. Read More »
