Fastest supercomputer in the world models dark matter, HIV family tree simultaneously

Roadrunner Universe model seeks to better understand both dark energy and dark matter, the least understood constituents of the cosmos. LANL image.

In November of last year, scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory switched on Roadrunner, the world's fastest computer. IBM and the Department of Energy built the machine to model nuclear explosions, but two new studies, both released today, are proof that the computer's massive power has been at least as devoted to peaceful science as to simulating thermonuclear weapons. Full Story.




Roadrunner supercomputer maps HIV family tree

HIV phylogenetic tree is color coded by infected patient. LANL image.

Physicist Tanmoy Bhattacharya and HIV researcher Bette Korber are creating an evolutionary genetic family tree based on samples taken by the international Center for HIV/AIDS Vaccine Immunology consortium, in order to compare the evolutionary history of more than 10,000 sequences from more than 400 people with HIV. Full Story.





Roadrunner models nonlinear physics
of high-power lasers

Los Alamos National Laboratory scientists Lin Yin and Brian Albright, along with Los Alamos guest scientist Kevin Bowers, are using an adapted version of a particle-in-cell plasma physics code . . . on the Laboratory's Roadrunner supercomputer to model the nonlinear physics of laser backscatter energy transfer and plasma instabilities to assist colleagues at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as they attempt to reach fusion ignition at NIF next year. Full Story.




First-ever simulation of stretching silver nanowire over period of millisecond

Very tiny wires, called nanowires, made from such metals as silver and gold, may play a crucial role as electrical or mechanical switches in the development of future-generation ultrasmall nanodevices. Full Story.

Additional stories this week about science on the Roadrunner supercomputer can be found at United Press International and Electrical Engineering Times.




Carefully cleaning up the garbage at Los Alamos

Technical Area 21 at Los Alamos National Laboratory during a brief morning rain and hail storm. New York Times photo.

No one knows for sure what is buried in the Manhattan Project-era dump here. At the very least, there is probably a truck down there that was contaminated in 1945 at the Trinity test site, where the world's first nuclear explosion seared the sky and melted the desert sand 200 miles south of here during World War II. Full Story.



Creating an intelligent tomorrow

Española Schools Superintendent Janette Archuleta attributed some of these [math and science] gains to the LANL-supported Math and Science Academy programs. The MSA is a virtual academy that teaches the teachers, and has gradually won support for its rigorous professional development from five school districts in Northern New Mexico. Full Story.




Navigator recalls bomb drop

The Enola Gay crew in 1945.

The man who navigated the world's first atomic bomb to its destructive destination in Hiroshima recalled on Sunday the explicit instruction his team was given that historic August day in 1945. Full Story (requires subscription or viewing an ad).




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SAGE awards honor women making a difference

SAGE magazine, the Albuquerque Journal's monthly magazine for women, has announced the winners of its SAGE 20 Women Making a Difference award. Science: Bette Korber, an immunologist at Los Alamos National Laboratory who is working on a global HIV database and an AIDS vaccine.





Researchers revisit 'first experiments'

MaRIE is a potentially far-reaching project designed to anchor LANL research into the coming decades. The concept, which is still under development and beginning to take a more definite shape, is about an experimental facility that would be devoted to advanced materials research and charged with creating high performance materials of the future. (Full story)





Standards for a new genomic era

The bill contains $6.38 billion in stockpile stewardship for the National Nuclear Security Administration, much of which will be directed to Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories. (Full story)








Honey bees trained to detect contraband

How are honey bees being trained to detect explosives and narcotics? Scientist Robert Wingo of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico, [spoke] on "Explosives and Narcotics Detection by Monitoring of the Proboscis Extension Reflex in Apis mellifera (Honey Bee)" (Full story)







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Solar system’s edge surprises astronomers

Illustration of IBEX spacecraft (SwRI).

The edge of the solar system is tied up with a ribbon, astronomers have discovered. The first global map of the solar system reveals that its edge is nothing like what had been predicted.

“Our maps show structure and energy spectra that are completely different from what any model has predicted,” says study coauthor Herbert Funsten of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Full Story.




Mystery space "ribbon" found at solar system's edge

The first full-sky map of solar system's edge has revealed a bright ribbon of uncharged atoms. From NatGeo.

The IBEX spacecraft’s map shows that the ribbon measures roughly two billion miles (three billion kilometers) long and several hundred thousand miles wide. The ribbon isn't visible to people and wouldn't harm spacecraft or humans passing through it, IBEX principal investigator David McComas, [formerly of Los Alamos National Laboratory], now with Southwest Research Institute in partnership with LANL. Full Story.




N.M. project would link nation's 3 electric grids

Gov. Bill Richardson gives a news conference in Albuquerque announcing superstation. AP photo.

Officials announced an ambitious project in New Mexico on Tuesday that would allow energy to flow more freely across the nation's three massive power grids. American Superconductor has partnered with scientists at Los Alamos, Oak Ridge and Argonne national laboratories for two decades to develop the superconductor, which already is being used in Columbus, Ohio; and Long Island and Albany, N.Y. Full Story.





Companies making fuel from algae now

The Solix demonstration facility produces up to 3000 gallons of algal biofuels per acre per year. Solix photo.

Solix is collaborating with the Los Alamos National Laboratory to use its acoustic-focusing technology to concentrate algal cells into a dense mixture by blasting them with sound waves. Oil can then be extracted from the mixture by squeezing it out; this makes the extraction process much easier and cheaper. Full Story.




Death Stars: What exactly are gamma-ray bursts?

Gamma-ray bursts occur when a giant star uses up all its fuel, collapses, and turns a vast amount of its mass into radiation. NASA illustration.

On 2 July 1969, physicists Ray Klebesadel and Roy Olson sat down in a tiny office at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico to examine data sent back by the U.S. Vela 4 spy satellites. At the time, the U.S. was afraid the Soviet Union was planning to test atomic bombs in space. Full Story.




Malicious software targeted by newly patented technology

Malware has the potential to pose security threats, which is where scientists from Los Alamos National Laboratory come in.

The laboratory announced Tuesday that a first patent had been issued on a new malware defense, known as support vector machine classifiers, or SVM, that appears to have a number of promising advantages over other systems currently being used. Full Story.

Also this week in the Monitor:

DOE grant supports solar energy innovations

Two more allotments of what is mainly stimulus funding have been made available to Los Alamos National Laboratory in recent days. Full Story.





Virtualization proves cost effective

Officials at the Energy Department's Los Alamos National Laboratory have used virtualization technology to address issues of cooling, limited floor space and power consumption as they sought to ramp up capacity in data centers on the sprawling, 36-mile campus. Full Story.



Astronomers seek to explore the cosmic Dark Ages

Workers install conduit and cabling for the LWA near Socorro. LWA photo.

The Long Wavelength Array (LWA), which will consist of about 13,000 spindly antennas in the desert west of Socorro, N.M. The first 256 detectors arrived on site last week, and the completion date for the system is 2010. The LWA is sponsored by the University of New Mexico, Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Naval Research Laboratory, and others. Full Story.




Magnet lab to investigate promising superconductor

The Applied Superconductivity Center at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory has received $1.2 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Energy to understand and enhance a new form of superconducting material. The other institutions participating in the collaboration are Los Alamos National Laboratory, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Fermilab, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and others. Full Story.






Future Darwinism - quantum evolution I

In a major break-through, Wojciech H Zurek, an eminent theoretical physicist currently based at the US Los Alamos National Laboratory, has developed a proof based on the Darwinian model, which provides a third and more rigorous interpretation of the emergence of classical reality from quantum states and at the same time offers a key element in the proof needed to realise a Unified Darwinian Theory. Full Story.



Road to exascale computers

Exascale computers, which would be 1000 times more powerful than today's fastest supercomputers, will need to have optics playing a bigger role, said Jeffrey Kash of IBM Research during a presentation at Frontiers in Optics 2009.

The top supercomputer today is the IBM Roadrunner petascale floating point operations per second (petaflops) machine at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Full Story.


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Geneticists call for better draft sequences

Patrick Chain of the Joint Genome Institute at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and his colleagues from more than ten sequencing centres across the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom suggest in their paper that a new set of standards needs to be applied to genome projects. (Full story)




Also from Nature News this week:

Fossil rewrites early human evolution

The fossils come from a sediment layer sandwiched between two layers of volcanic rock known as tuff - each dated to 4.4 million years ago, says a team led by Giday WoldeGabriel, of Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. (Full story)





Discovering Ardi, Sunday October 11 at 7 PM MDT, 9 Eastern

Documenting the sustained, intensive investigation leading up to the landmark publication in Science of the Ardipithecus ramidus fossils. "These are the results of a scientific mission to our deep African past," said project co-director and geologist, Dr. Giday WoldeGabriel of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. (Check it out)


How green is your data?

Los Alamos National Laboratory began a server virtualization push in 2006. The lab has eliminated 105 physical servers and now runs more than 250 virtual servers on 13 physical hosts. Virtualization has saved the lab 873,000 kilowatt hours per year and about $639,000 in energy costs. (Full story)


DOE labs keep busy with research

"In a future with no nuclear testing, the nuclear deterrent relies on the scientific credibility and the agility of the staffs of the labs more than on the stockpile itself," says Duncan McBranch, principal associate director of science, technology, and engineering at LANL. (Full story—subscription required)

KRSN 1490 AM

Lab scientist discusses climate change

Los Alamos scientist Nate McDowell spoke about new approaches to assessing regional climate impacts on vegetation during an interview this week on Los Alamos radio station KRSN 1490 AM. (Listen in)








Virtualization proves cost effective for some agencies

Officials at the Energy Department’s Los Alamos National Laboratory have used virtualization technology to address issues of cooling, limited floor space and power consumption as they sought to ramp up capacity in data centers on the sprawling, 36-mile campus. (Full story)


NNSA marks Energy Awareness Month

Los Alamos's "Cerillos" supercomputer ranked second [for energy efficiency] at more than 458 million flops per watt, while the lab's "Roadrunner," the world's fastest supercomputer for the past two years, came in fourth at nearly 445 million flops per watt. (Full story)

The butterfly effect gets entangled

The study supports long-standing ideas that there is no single sharp boundary between the quantum and classical worlds, says quantum physicist Wojciech Zurek of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. (Full story)






NASA grant to fund search for life on Mars

In cooperation with scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory, Delaware State University researchers will develop sensors to be placed on future Mars rovers that can detect compounds essential for life, even underneath the soil. (Full story)


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