High performance computing and the humanities are finally connecting — with a little matchmaking help from the Department of Energy and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Both organizations have teamed up to create the Humanities High Performance Computing Program, a one-of-a-kind initiative that gives humanities researchers access to some of the world’s most powerful supercomputers.

Researchers tackling some of the most challenging scientific problems, from improving energy efficiency in combustion devices to developing new particle accelerators for scientific discovery to studying properties of new materials, have been awarded access to supercomputing resources at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center.

From COBE to Planck and beyond, the volume of data from measurements of the cosmic microwave background continues to grow by orders of magnitude. The Computational Cosmology Center, a collaboration between Berkeley Lab’s Physics Division and Computational Research Division, has algorithms and implementations in the works so NERSC’s supercomputers can handle the rising tide.

Integrated Microbial Genomics with Microbiome Samples (IMG/M) is a powerful computational tool for understanding metagenomics, the collective genomes of communities of microorganisms. IMG/M will soon be expanded to include metagenomic data from humans, opening insights into how microbial communities in the human body maintain, threaten, or otherwise affect our health.

Berkeley Lab researchers have won a prestigious ACM Gordon Bell Prize for special achievement in high performance computing for their research into the energy harnessing potential of nanostructures. Their method was used to predict the efficiency of a new solar cell material.

Why not let the smallest devices build themselves? Berkeley Lab scientists are developing easier ways to synthesize ever-more sophisticated nanoscale machines. Their work could lead to faster, more powerful computers and improved ways of converting sunlight to electricity.

Another step towards quantum computing – the Holy Grail of data processing and storage – was achieved when an international team of scientists that included Berkeley Lab researchers was able to successfully store and retrieve information using the nucleus of an atom.

Before quantum computing becomes practical, researchers will need to find a practical way to store information as quantum bits, or qubits. Researchers are making significant progress toward the creation of electronic devices based on qubits made of single ions implanted in silicon, one of the most practical of all materials.