Noontime Screening: Debugging the Gender Gap

At noon today in Bldg. 50 Auditorium, Berkeley Lab’s Diversity and Inclusion Office and Computing Sciences Area will present a free screening of the award-winning documentary CODE: Debugging the Gender Gap. The screening is in honor of Women’s History Month.

After her daughter dropped out of computing science in college because she “didn’t belong,” documentary filmmaker Robin Hauser Reynolds “set out to debug the reasons behind the gender gap and digital divide.” Her investigations took her from the halls of academia to the cubicles of leading Silicon Valley tech companies. Hauser Reynolds says she hopes her film will inspire change in the “mindsets, stereotypes, clogs in the educational pipeline, startup culture, lack of role models and sexism [that] all play important roles in this mounting gender, ethnicity and economic issue.” 

Running time is 80 minutes.

Could Material Defects Improve Solar Cells?

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) are using supercomputers to study what may seem paradoxical: certain defects in silicon solar cells may actually improve their performance.

Using computer simulations executed at NREL and NERSC, the researchers introduced impurities to layers adjacent to the silicon wafer in a solar cell and found some specific defects to be beneficial. The findings, published in Applied Physics Letters, run counter to conventional wisdom, according to Paul Stradins, the principal scientist and a project leader of the silicon photovoltaics group at NREL.

NERSC Announces HPC Achievement Award Winners

NERSC announced the winners of the 2016 High Performance Computing (HPC) Achievement Awards on Tuesday during the annual NERSC Users Group meeting at Berkeley Lab.

The awards recognize NERSC users who have either demonstrated an innovative use of HPC resources to solve a scientific problem or whose work has had an exceptional impact on scientific understanding or society. To encourage younger scientists who are using HPC in their research, NERSC includes two early career awards.

NERSC 2016 Award for High Impact Science

Charles Koven and William Riley of Berkeley Lab’s Climate and Ecosystem Sciences Division and David Lawrence of the National Center for Atmospheric Research were honored for their role in using an Earth system model to demonstrate the atmospheric effect of emissions released from carbon sequestered in melting permafrost soil.

NERSC 2016 Award for High Impact Science: Early Career

Nathan Howard, a research scientist at MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, was recognized for his pioneering computational work in plasma turbulence simulations.

NERSC 2016 Award for Innovative Use of HPC

Former Berkeley Lab computational scientist Scott French was cited for his role in helping seismologists create a unique 3D scan of the Earth’s interior that resolved some long-standing questions about mantle plumes and volcanic hotspots.

NERSC 2016 Award for Innovative Use of HPC: Early Career

Min Si, a graduate student from the University of Tokyo who is working at Argonne National Laboratory, was selected for her pioneering work in developing novel system software in the context of MPI3 one-sided communication.

Berkeley Lab Staff Contribute Papers to SIAM Conference on Parallel Computing

Every other year, hundreds of parallel computing experts convene for the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) Conference on Parallel Processing for Scientific Computing. When the seventeenth meeting in the series is held April 12-15 in Paris, France, a number of Berkeley Lab staff will contribute their expertise in papers and invited talks. The conference provides a forum for communication among the applied mathematics, computer science, and computational science and engineering communities.
 
The conference series has played a key role in promoting parallel scientific computing, algorithms for parallel systems and parallel numerical algorithms. The conference is unique in its emphasis on the intersection between high performance scientific computing and scalable algorithms, architectures, and software.
 
On Thursday, April 14, Berkeley Lab Deputy Director Horst Simon will receive the SIAM Activity Group on Supercomputing (SIAG/SC) Career Prize. Established in 2009, the prize is awarded to an outstanding senior researcher who has made broad and distinguished contributions to the field of algorithms research and development for parallel scientific and engineering computing. Simon will give a guest lecture on “Supercomputers and Superintelligence.”

ESnet’s iPerf3 Tool Gets a Nod from Virtualization Review

The web site Virtualization Review recently introduced its users to ESnet’s iPerf3, an open source bandwidth monitoring tool. When ESnet staff took over the tool’s maintenance, they decided to reimplement iPerf from scratch with the goal of a smaller, simpler code base. As a result, iPerf3 can be used on many more operating systems than the original.

Planning to Attend SC16? Hotel Reservations Open Monday, April 4

CS staff planning to attend the SC16 conference to be held Nov. 13-18 in Salt Lake City can reserve hotel rooms through the conference web site starting at 8 a.m. Monday, April 4 (PDT).

Many SC16 hotels are located within a few blocks of the convention center. Others are located near the Salt Lake City airport for convenient arrivals and departures. A few others are located near the University of Utah campus. Bus transportation will be provided to and from any conference hotels farther than one-half mile from the convention center.

Links to a map of hotels and the online reservation system will be available on the SC16 site when the housing reservation system opens. A range of prices is available. Free internet access is included with all rooms booked through the SC16 website.

This Week’s CS Seminars

Wednesday, March 30

CITRIS Research Exchange
Mechanical Computing Redux for the Internet of Things
12 to1 p.m., 250 Sutardja Dai Hall, UC Berkeley
Prof. Tsu-Jae King Liu, UC Berkeley

The proliferation of mobile electronic devices and the emergence of applications such as wireless sensor networks and the Internet of Things have brought energy consumption to the fore of challenges for future information-processing devices. The energy efficiency of a digital logic integrated circuit is fundamentally limited by non-zero transistor off-state leakage current. Mechanical switches have zero leakage current and potentially can overcome this fundamental limit. This seminar will describe recent progress toward realizing the promise of ultra-low-power mechanical computing.

Applied Math Seminar
3:30 to 4:30 p.m. 939 Evans Hall, UC Berkeley
Xiu Yang, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Compressive sensing has become a powerful addition to uncertainty quantification in recent years. We propose a new method to identify new bases for random variables through linear mappings such that the representation of the quantity of interest is more sparse with new basis functions associated with the new random variables. This sparsity increases both the efficiency and accuracy of the compressive sensing-based uncertainty quantification method. Specifically, we consider rotation-based linear mappings which are determined iteratively for Hermite polynomial expansions. We demonstrate the efficiency of this method with uncertainty quantification problems in PDEs and biomolecular systems.

Thursday, March 31

Data-driven Models of Cybersecurity
1 to 2 p.m., 50B-4205
Benjamin Edwards, University of New Mexico

Many cybersecurity problems today occur at a global scale, involving nations, corporations, or individuals whose actions have impact around the world. Despite these global, persistent problems, there is limited research on the actual effectiveness of the many interventions that have been proposed or deployed. In this talk we explore how data-driven models can help understand the impact of security interventions. Three important components are necessary for understanding the impact of interventions: identifying trends in incidents and defenses, understanding risk factors for incidents across systems, and rigorous statistical models that assess impact. Using these three components, we explore three different security datasets, find common features, and come to some surprising conclusions. We conclude by looking ahead to some promising future work using data-driven approaches to cybersecurity. (See seminars calendar for remote access instructions.)

Friday, April 1

Jacobs Design Conversations
Design and the Internet of Important Things
12 to 1 p.m., 310 Jacobs Hall (2530 Ridge Road), UC Berkeley
Greg Petroff, GE

Each semester, the Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation invites leading designers and makers to Berkeley to speak as part of the Jacobs Design Conversations series. Connecting diverse perspectives under one roof, Jacobs Design Conversations are spaces for dialogue on a broad spectrum of innovations and ideas. As part of this series, Greg Petroff will share his insights with Berkeley’s design innovation community. Greg Petroff is the Chief Experience Officer at GE Software and General Manager of the User Experience Center of
 Excellence (UX CoE) for GE. The UX CoE is charged with elevating
 the quality of digital experiences created by GE for its customers. At GE,
 Greg is leading efforts to define the human interface to the 
Industrial Internet, connecting people to machines and systems in
 meaningful ways.

 Greg is known for his ability to use design skills to solve business problems. His background combines formal training in architecture with extensive experience in designing interactive products.