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.

The Department of Energy will invest $777 million in 46 new Energy Frontier Research Centers over the next five years as part of President Barack Obama’s plans to reinvigorate American science. Berkeley Lab will be home to the Center for Nanoscale Control of Geologic CO2, led by Don DePaolo, director of the Earth Sciences Division, to study carbon dioxide storage deep underground.

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.

Abrupt climate change is the focus of IMPACTS, a major new program bringing together six DOE national laboratories to investigate the instability of marine ice sheets, warming of the boreal forests and Arctic, megadroughts in the Southwest, and catastrophic release of methane from hydrates.

The rush toward multicore processors in supercomputing and even in consumer electronics comes at the expense of the best available software. Samuel Williams and his colleagues in the Computational Research Division and NERSC used a powerful code that models magnetohydrodynamic turbulence to check out five multicores and found just one, the Cell Blade, that outperformed them all.

Contact: Jon Bashor JBashor@lbl.gov, 510-486-5849

BERKELEY, Calif. — The U.S. Department of Energy announced today that it is allocating about 10.4 million CPU hours on supercomputers at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory as part of a program to accelerate scientific discoveries in multiple disciplines, including climate, [...]

Contact: Jon Bashor, jbashor@lbl.gov, 510-486-5849

BERKELEY, CA and SEATTLE, WA – The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Cray Inc. today announced the successful completion of the acceptance test of one of the world’s largest supercomputers. Installed at the DOE’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), the [...]

Media contact: Jon Bashor, jbashor@lbl.gov, 510-486-5849

BERKELEY, CA — Kathy Yelick, a professor of computer science at the University of California at Berkeley and an internationally recognized expert in developing methods to advance the use of supercomputers, has been named director of the Department of Energy’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC).

Katherine Yelick, head of [...]

Scientific contact: Peter Nugent, (510) 486-6492, penugent@lbl.gov
Media contact: Paul Preuss, (510) 486-6249, paul_preuss@lbl.gov

BERKELEY, CA — A group of scientists affiliated with the SuperNova Legacy Survey (SNLS) have found startling evidence that there is more than one kind of Type Ia supernova, a class of exploding stars which until now has been regarded as [...]