Friday, July 28, 2017



LANL adds capacity to Trinity Supercomputer for stockpile stewardship

Trinity supercomputer, LANL image.

Los Alamos National Laboratory has boosted the computational capacity of their Trinity supercomputer with a merger of two system partitions.

Now available for production computing in the Lab’s classified network, the system now uses Xeon Haswell and the Xeon Phi Knights Landing (KNL) processors. Trinity has provided service for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA)’s Stockpile Stewardship Program since summer 2016, but it has been dramatically expanded to now provide almost 680,000 advanced technology KNL processors as a key part of NNSA’s overall Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) Program. (Full Story)



Researchers explore extraterrestrial ice

Ice VII, from the Stanford Daily.

A group of Stanford researchers recently published a paper on their first-of-its-kind research that captured water freezing into an alternative form called ice VII (“ice seven”), which is found within other planetary bodies.

Arianna Gleason, the lead author in the study, is a visiting scientist in the Extreme Environments Laboratory of Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences and a postdoctoral fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

“[The study] helps us understand how the moon, the icy moons and the planets, actually form,” Gleason said. (Full Story)



True random numbers are here — what that means for data centers

Random number generator, Whitewood photo.

For many decades, the term “random numbers” meant “pseudo-random numbers” to anyone who thought much about the issue and understood that computers simply were not equipped to produce anything that was truly random.

In November of last year the Entropy Engine won an Oscar of Innovation award for collaborators Los Alamos National Laboratory and Whitewood Security. This Entropy Engine is capable of delivering as much as 350 Mbps of true random numbers—sufficient to feed an entire data center with enough random data to dramatically improve all cryptographic processes. (Full Story)



Spotlight shines on ground-breaking technologies

Ray Newell, LANL photo.

Quantum-cybersecurity expert Ray Newell received the 2016 Richard P. Feynman Innovation Prize at a July 20 ceremony celebrating the “Super Power of the Entrepreneur.” Los Alamos National Laboratory researchers Miles Beaux and Nataliia Makedonska, and post-doctoral researchers Jessica Kubicek-Sutherland and Vamshi Chillara were also recognized for their exceptional research presentations at DisrupTech, an event that brings together investors, business leaders and others in the community to learn about disruptive technologies—those technologies that could potentially up-end the way we live and work—being developed at Los Alamos. (Full Story)



Herbert Van de Sompel to receive Paul Evan Peters Award

Van de Sompel, LANL photo.

Herbert Van de Sompel, research scientist at the Research Library of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, has been named the 2017 recipient of the Paul Evan Peters Award from the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), the Association of Research Libraries, and EDUCAUSE.

The award recognizes notable, lasting achievements in the creation and innovative use of network-based information resources and services that advance scholarship and intellectual productivity. (Full Story)



Trying to ‘fill in the gaps’

Shops and restaurants on East Palace Avenue, Journal photo.

Buildings in the 100 block of Santa Fe’s East Palace Avenue, once an entryway for Los Alamos’ secret Manhattan Project and now a hub for gift shops and restaurants, have a history that dates back hundreds of years.

John Ruminer, a former Los Alamos National Laboratory engineer and local historian who has been researching the structures just off The Plaza, enlisted the help of retired tree ring experts – officially called dendrochronologists. (Full Story)

To subscribe to Los Alamos Press Highlights, please e-mail listmanager@lanl.gov and include the words subscribe PressHighlights in the body of your email message; to unsubscribe, include unsubscribe PressHighlights.

Please visit us at www.lanl.gov