(Press-News.org) BERKELEY, Calif.—The Department of Energy's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), already one of the world's leading centers for scientific productivity, is now home to the fifth most powerful supercomputer in the world and the second most powerful in the United States, according to the latest edition of the TOP500 list, the definitive ranking of the world's top computers.
NERSC's newest supercomputer, a 153,408 processor-core Cray XE6 system, posted a performance of 1.05 petaflops (quadrillions of calculations per second) running the Linpack benchmark. In keeping with NERSC's tradition of naming computers for renowned scientists, the system is named Hopper in honor of Admiral Grace Hopper, a pioneer in software development and programming languages. The system, installed d in September 2010, is funded by DOE's Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research.
Established in 1974, NERSC is located at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California and provides computing systems and services to more than 3,000 researchers supported by the Department of Energy (DOE). NERSC's users, located at universities, national laboratories, and other research institutions around the country, report producing more than 1,500 scientific publications each year as a result of calculations run at NERSC.
"While we are elated to have entered the petascale performance arena, we are especially excited by the computational science potential offered by Hopper," said Kathy Yelick, Director of the NERSC Division and Associate Laboratory Director of Computing Sciences at Berkeley Lab. "We selected Cray as the system vendor after a competitive procurement based in large part on how proposed systems performed running our application benchmarks. Now that the system is installed and operational, we will begin our acceptance testing in which we run some of the most demanding scientific applications to ensure that Hopper will meet the day-to-day demands of our users."
NERSC serves one of the largest research communities of all supercomputing centers in the United States. The center's supercomputers are used to tackle a wide range of scientific challenges, including global climate change, combustion, clean energy, new materials, astrophysics, genomics, particle physics and chemistry. The more than 400 projects being addressed by NERSC users represent the research mission areas of DOE's Office of Science.
The increasing power of supercomputers helps scientists study problems in greater detail and with greater accuracy, such as increasing the resolution of climate models and creating models of new materials with thousands of atoms. Supercomputers are increasingly used to compliment scientific experimentation by allowing researchers to test theories using computational models and analyzed large scientific data sets. NERSC is also home to Franklin, a 38,128 core Cray XT4 supercomputer with a Linpack performance of 266 teraflops (trillions of calculations per second). Franklin is ranked number 27 on the newest TOP500 list.
INFORMATION:
About NERSC and Berkeley Lab
The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) is the primary high-performance computing facility for scientific research sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science. Berkeley Lab is a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory located in Berkeley, California. It conducts unclassified scientific research and is managed by the University of California for the DOE Office of Science.
Read the TOP500 Press Release
For more information about computing sciences at Berkeley Lab, please visit: www.lbl.gov/cs
With the help of babies and more than 5,000 of their diapers, Emory University researchers have developed an accurate, noninvasive method to determine estrogen levels in infants.
The method, previously used in nonhuman primates, will allow researchers to learn more about the association between estrogen levels in human infants and their long-term reproductive development as well as the development of sex-specific behaviors, such as toy preference or cognitive differences. What's more, the method will also allow researchers to look at how early disruption of the endocrine ...
VIDEO:
University of Cincinnati researcher Denis Conover has cataloged countless plant species in the Cincinnati, Ohio, area in recent years.
Click here for more information.
According to research published today by a University of Cincinnati faculty member, native plants in southwestern Ohio are flowering significantly earlier, a finding he attributes, at least in part, to global warming.
UC biologist Denis Conover, field service associate professor, has spent countless ...
CINCINNATI—Cardiac researchers at the University of Cincinnati (UC) have found a new cellular pathway that could help in developing therapeutic treatments for obesity-related disorders, like diabetes and heart disease.
This research is being presented at the American Heart Association's Scientific Session in Chicago Nov. 16.
Tapan Chatterjee, PhD, and researchers in the division of cardiovascular diseases found that action by the enzyme histone deacetylase 9 (HDAC9) can lead to obesity-induced body fat dysfunction and that HDAC9-regulated pathways could be targets for ...
EAST LANSING, Mich. — Transforming vacant urban lots into farms and community gardens could provide Detroit residents with a majority of their fruits and vegetables.
As city officials ponder proposals for urban farms, a Michigan State University study indicates that a combination of urban farms, community gardens, storage facilities and hoop houses – greenhouses used to extend the growing season – could supply local residents with more than 75 percent of their vegetables and more than 40 percent of their fruits.
The study, which appears in the current issue of The Journal ...
(CHICAGO) – New results from a study by neuroscientists at Rush University Medical Center suggest that people at risk of developing Alzheimer's disease exhibit a specific structural change in the brain that can be visualized by brain imaging. The findings may help identify those who would most benefit from early intervention.
The study will be presented at Neuroscience 2010, the annual meeting for the Society of Neuroscience in San Diego, Calif., on Wednesday, November 17.
"One of the main challenges in the field of Alzheimer's disease is identifying individuals at ...
VIDEO:
The binary star system J0923+3028 consists of two white dwarfs that are gradually spiraling in toward each other. In about 100 million years they will merge. Since their combined mass...
Click here for more information.
Sometimes when you're looking for one thing, you find something completely different and unexpected. In the scientific endeavor, such serendipity can lead to new discoveries. Today, researchers who found the first hypervelocity stars escaping the ...
(SACRAMENTO, Calif.) — Patients with head and neck cancer who have never smoked have much better survival rates after radiation therapy than patients with a history of smoking, new research from UC Davis Cancer Center has found.
The study by Allen M. Chen and colleagues in the UC Davis radiation oncology and otolaryngology departments is among the first of its kind to examine prognosis differences based on smoking history in patients with head and neck cancer who are treated with radiation therapy.
The study, published online in American Journal of Clinical Oncology, ...
How you think about your goals—whether it's to improve yourself or to do better than others—can affect whether you reach those goals. Different kinds of goals can also have distinct effects on your relationships with people around you, according to the authors of a paper published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
People with "mastery goals" want to improve themselves. Maybe they want to get better grades, make more sales, or land that triple toe loop. On the other hand, people with what psychologists ...
SAN DIEGO — New research indicates that the integration of senses and functions in the brain is common. About two percent of the population has a condition called synesthesia, in which two different sensations, like color and sound, are experienced at once. Although this condition is rare, the new findings suggest the brain is wired in complex and sometimes overlapping ways to help people interpret and understand their environments. The research was presented at Neuroscience 2010, the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience and the world's largest source of emerging ...
A Princeton scientist with an interdisciplinary bent has taken two well-known problems in mathematics and reformulated them as a physics question, offering new tools to solve challenges relevant to a host of subjects ranging from improving data compression to detecting gravitational waves.
Salvatore Torquato, a professor of chemistry, has shown that two abstract puzzles in geometry -- known as the "covering" and "quantizer" problems -- can be recast as "ground state" problems in physics. Ground state problems relate to the study of molecule systems at their lowest levels ...
