Scientists will examine cloud computing as a cost-effective and energy-efficient computing paradigm to accelerate discoveries in biology, climate change and physics. A program funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act through the Department of Energy will examine cloud computing as a way to accelerate discoveries in a variety of disciplines.

In order to facilitate data-intensive research, ESnet, the Department of Energy’s high-performance networking facility managed by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, is receiving $62 million to develop what will be the world’s fastest computer network, designed specifically to support science.

Berkeley Lab won four of R&D Magazine’s R&D 100 Awards for 2009, which recognize the 100 most significant proven technological advances of the year. This year’s winners offer the promise of cost-competitive solar cells, more computer memory at less cost, an unmatched look at atomic scale matter in 3-D, and a more powerful way to find hidden energy sources.

Finding rare and fleeting cosmic events not only requires the right kind of telescope and camera, it depends on high-performance computing that can pinpoint objects of interest among thousands of sky images while there’s still time for follow-up observations. Caltech and DOE’s NERSC join forces in just such a search, the Palomar Transient Factory.

Berkeley Lab researchers have created a unique new memory storage medium that can pack thousands of times more data into one square inch of space than conventional chips and preserve this data for more than a billion years!

Berkeley Lab researchers have successfully demonstrated that electric fields can be used as ON/OFF switches in doped multiferroic films, a development that holds promise for future magnetic data storage and spintronic devices.

Berkeley Lab’s interest in the Planck mission to map the cosmic microwave background goes back to a proposal that evolved into the present design – and extends into the future as NERSC’s powerful computers stand by to analyze the coming flood of data.

Global climate change is hotly debated, to say the least. But two experts warn that using short-term trends that show little temperature change (or even slight cooling) to refute global warming is misleading. The long-term pattern clearly shows human activities are causing the earth’s climate to heat up.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Energy Sciences Network (ESnet), a high-speed network linking tens of thousands of researchers around the nation, was honored on April 14, 2009 with an Excellence.Gov award for its achievements in leveraging technology.

Guarding water supplies, protecting endangered species and curbing greenhouse gases is going high-tech. Environmental scientists are turning to innovative cyber-infrastructures and data-mining tools developed by researchers at Berkeley Lab, Microsoft Research, and the University of California, Berkeley.