December 2013 - NewsBytes

Introducing: Bruce Mah and Wurchel Yoo.

ESnet's Michael Bennett Recognized by IEEE for Work in Energy Efficiency

Michael Bennett, head of ESnet’s Network Engineering Group, has been awarded an IEEE-SA Standards Medallion for his work in helping to create energy-saving standards for devices with Ethernet connections. The standards are expected to help save terawatts of otherwise-wasted electricity by automatically switching networked components to energy-saving modes when not in use. More>

DOE Awards $25.4 Million for Exascale Interconnect Design

Under DOE’s new DesignForward initiative, AMD, Cray, IBM, Intel Federal and NVIDIA will work to advance extreme-scale, on the path to exascale, computing technology that is vital to national security, scientific research, energy security and the nation's economic competitiveness. “Berkeley Lab is pleased to place these contracts on behalf of DOE and its laboratories," said Sudip Dosanjh, Director of NERSC.

Final Girder Tops CRT's Heavy Construction Phase

The final steel girder of the Computational Research and Theory facility was hoisted into place Friday in a "topping off" ceremony. As tradition dictates, the beam was decorated with an evergreen and American flag and signed by both the builders and some of the eventual occupants, including Kathy Yelick, Associate Lab Director for Computing Sciences, and division directors Sudip Dosanjh (NERSC), David Brown (Computational Research), and Greg Bell (Scientific Networking).

Berkeley Lab Hosts Bay Area Scientific Computing

This month, Berkeley Lab hosted Bay Area Scientific Computing Day—an annual one-day meeting to foster interactions and collaborations between researchers in the fields of scientific computing and computational science and engineering from the San Francisco Bay Area. Bert de Jong, leader of CRD's Scientific Computing Group, chaired this year's meeting. More>

CRD Supports TechWomen 2013

Each year TechWomen connects women from Middle Eastern countries with their professional counterparts in the U.S. and gives them access to networks, resources and industry contacts. This year, Daniela Ushizima (CRD) mentored Salma Elaoud. Elaoud was one of five participants hosted at the Lab under this U.S. State Department program. More> 

NERSC’s New User Services Group Lead

Richard Gerber has been named Group Leader for the NERSC User Services Group. As Senior Science Advisor and User Services Deputy Group Lead, Gerber spent the last 25 years helping scientists run, debug and optimize codes on supercomputers, as well as gather computing and storage requirements needed to support scientific discovery.

ESnet Staff Demonstrates SDN Leadership

On November 22 ESnet’s Inder Monga joined Brocade and Infinera staff in demonstrating how software defined networking (SDN) can be used to provision network services and automatically optimize resources across a multi-layer network as traffic and services change. The successful demo for service providers, enterprise and research and education network operators leveraged ESnet’s award-winning On-Demand Secure Circuits and Advanced Reservation System (OSCARS). In an interview leading up to the event, ESnet Director Greg Bell talked about the importance of SDN. Bell describes how ESnet has been conducting localized tests to innovate, experiment and demonstrate the value of SDN when applied towards end-to-end support of data-intensive science.