High-dimensional visualization techniques at Stony Brook and Brookhaven are helping reveal the interactions that drive climate and other complexities.
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December 2011
Mining for aerosols and other particles
Klaus Mueller’s latest n-dimensional visualization work capitalizes on a decade-long collaboration with Department of Energy atmospheric chemist Alla Zelenyuk, work aimed at seeing the proverbial forest amidst trees of data. At DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Zelenyuk specializes in using single-particle mass spectrometry to analyze the real-time transformations of nanoparticles. This includes atmospheric particles, such [...]
October 2011
Helping hydrogen along
Researchers have pursued clean hydrogen-based fuels for years. A Berkeley Lab team hopes to spur that quest with help from one of the world’s most powerful computers.
September 2011
Designer yeast
A Johns Hopkins University team has built a yeast chromosome from scratch, they report today in the journal Nature. Sarah Richardson used what she learned as a Computational Science Graduate Fellow to help design and monitor the chromosome’s construction.
Boosting Berkeley Lab’s bacteria research
For one summer, Sarah Richardson postponed her work computerizing yeast genome research and probed bacteria instead. As part of her Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship, Richardson served a 2009 practicum under Adam Arkin, director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Physical Biosciences Division. She made important contributions to Arkin’s research into an RNA-based transcription [...]
April 2011
A long view of Gulf oil spill
While others predicted when oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico might reach beaches, ocean modelers at Los Alamos National Laboratory and the National Center for Atmospheric Research asked when gushing oil might exit the Gulf, where it would go and how diluted it’d be, up to a year later.
Tracing CFCs and greenhouse gases
National Center for Atmospheric Research oceanographer Synte Peacock studies “the distribution of various tracers – something that tags a water mass and is carried around by ocean currents – to learn more about ocean circulation in the past and present.” These tracers include carbon and radiocarbon isotopes, paleotracers (fossils from the sea, in sediments and [...]
March 2011
Pounding out atomic nuclei
Thousands of tiny systems called atomic nuclei – specific combinations of protons and neutrons – prove extremely difficult to study but have big implications for nuclear stockpile stewardship. To describe all of the nuclei and the reactions between them, a nationwide collaboration is devising powerful algorithms that run on high-performance computers.
Cranking up the speed of DFT
Density functional theory (DFT) can be used to determine densities of protons and neutrons making up a nucleus. “If we can determine those densities precisely,” says Witold Nazarewicz, professor of physics at the University of Tennessee, “we can determine the binding energy – the energy stored in the nucleus.” The energy density functional (EDF) in [...]
January 2011
Small team carries large load
Sandia National Laboratories computer scientist Ronald Minnich calls the desktop-extension supercomputing project a large effort with a small team. “To do it with only four other people is pretty unusual,” Minnich says. “I would assume a normal company would allocate at least 10 times as many people to the effort. A lot of things we’ve [...]
Laptop supercomputing
A small team led by Sandia National Laboratories is attempting to virtually put the world’s most powerful supercomputers on a user’s own desktop or laptop.
