Parallel computing used to be reserved for big science projects, but in two years that’s all changed. Even laptops and hand-helds use parallel processors. Unfortunately, the software hasn’t kept pace. Kahty Yelick, Director of NERSC, describes the resulting chaos and the computing community’s efforts to develop exciting applications that take advantage of hundreds of processors on a single chip.

( Download Podcast | Presentation )

Arun Majumdar, Director of Berkeley Lab’s Environmental Energy Technologies Divsion, discusses current and future projections of economic growth, population, and global energy demand and supply, and explores the implications of these trends for the environment.

( Download Podcast | Presentation )

By exciting electric fields in plasma-based waveguides, lasers accelerate electrons in a fraction of the distance conventional accelerators require. The Accelerator and Fusion Research Division’s LOASIS program, headed by Wim Leemans, has used 40-trillion-watt laser pulses to deliver billion-electron-volt (1 GeV) electron beams within centimeters. Leemans looks ahead to BELLA, 10-GeV accelerating modules that could power a future linear collider.

( Download Podcast | Presentation )

Molecular movies of chemical reactions and material phase transformations need a strobe of x-rays, the penetrating light that reveals how atoms and molecules assemble in chemical and biological systems and complex materials. Roger Falcone, Director of the Advanced Light Source, discusses a new generation of x-ray sources that will enable a new science of atomic dynamics on ultrafast timescales.

( Download Podcast | Presentation )

A member of the Environmental Energy Technologies Division, Surabi Menon’s work focuses on the human contribution to increasing impacts of climate change. Her talk focuses on what humans can do about the effects of global warming by examining anthropogenic influences on climate and future anticipated impacts, using a climate model and her own observations.

( Download Podcast | Presentation )

Scientific visualization transforms abstract data into comprehensible images, and play a central role in both experimental and computational sciences. Wes Bethel, who heads the Scientific Visualization Group in the Computational Research Division, presents an overview of visualization and computer graphics, current research challenges, and future directions for the field.

( Download Podcast | Presentation )

Michael Barnett of the Physics Division discusses the ATLAS Experiment at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics’ (CERN) Large Hadron Collider. The collider will explore the aftermath of collisions at the highest energy ever produced in the lab, and will recreate the conditions of the universe a billionth of a second after the Big Bang.

( Download Podcast | Presentation )

Terry Hazen of the Earth Sciences Division is a leading authority on bioremediation, which uses biological processes to clean up toxic and non-toxic compounds. He discusses when it’s best to resort to engineered bioremediation of contaminated sites, and when it’s best to rely on natural attenuation.

( Download Podcast | Presentation )

Leading climate modeler Bill Collins joined the Earth Sciences Division in April to form a new department dedicated to atmospheric and climate science. He discusses how observations show that the Earth is warming at a rate unprecedented in recent history, and that human-induced changes in atmospheric chemistry are probably the main culprits.

( Download Podcast | Presentation )

Trudy Forte of the Life Sciences Division discusses her work developing nano-sized low-density lipoprotein (LDL) particles that can be used as a safe and effective means of delivering anticancer drugs to brain tumors, particularly glioblastoma multiforme.

( Download Podcast | Presentation )