National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center

Recommendations

Info

64 NERSC ANNUAL REPORT 2015 ‘Superfacilities’ Concept Showcases Interfacility Collaborations A GISAXS pattern from a printed organic photovoltaic sample as it dried in the beamline, part of a “superfacility” experiment based at Berkeley Lab. Image: Craig Tull, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Throughout 2015 NERSC saw increased interest in the coupled operation of experimental and computational facilities throughout the DOE Office of Science complex—the so-called “superfacility.” A superfacility is two or more facilities interconnected by means of a high performance network specifically engineered for science (such as ESnet) and linked together using workflow and data management software such that the scientific output of the connected facilities is greater than it otherwise could be. This represents a new experimental paradigm that allows HPC resources to be brought to bear on experimental work being done at, for example, a light source beamline within the context of the experimental run itself. Adding HPC to facility workflows is a growing trend, and NERSC is leveraging its experience with the Joint Genome Institute, the Advanced Light Source, the Large Hadron Collider, the Palomar Transient Factory, AmeriFlux and other experimental facilities to shape the interfaces, schedules and resourcing models that best fit what our facility users need. Treating facilities as users of HPC requires long-term data planning, real-time resource scheduling and pipelining of workflows. NERSC’s superfacility strategy focuses on scalable data analysis services that can be prototyped and reused as a new interfacility collaborations emerge. For example, in 2015 a collaborative effort linking the Advanced Light Source (ALS) at Berkeley Lab with supercomputing resources at NERSC and Oak Ridge National Laboratory via ESnet yielded exciting results in organic photovoltaics research. In a series of experiments, the operators of a specialized printer of organic photovoltaics used HPC to observe the structure of the material as it dried. Organic photovoltaics show promise as less expensive, more flexible materials for converting sunlight to electricity. During the experiments, scientists at the ALS simultaneously fabricated organic photovoltaics using a miniature slot-die printer and acquired beamline data of the samples as they were made. This data was transferred to NERSC via ESnet, where it was put into the SPOT Suite data portal and underwent analysis to translate the image pixels into the correct reciprocal space. Using the Globus data management tool developed by the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory, the output from those jobs was then sent to the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility for analysis, where the analysis code ran on the Titan supercomputer for six hours nonstop on 8,000 GPUs. A unique feature of this experiment was co-scheduling beamline time at the ALS with time and resources at NERSC and Oak Ridge, plus utilizing ESnet to link it all together. This was the first time a beamline was able to simultaneously take data and perform large-scale analysis on a supercomputer. NERSC and the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics In 2015 NERSC was once again fortunate to be part of the story behind a Nobel Prize. This time it was the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics, awarded to the leaders of two large neutrino experiments: Takaaki Kajita of Tokyo University, who led the Super-Kamiokande experiment, and Arthur B. McDonald of Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, head of the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO). According to the Nobel Prize committee, Kajita and McDonald were honored “for the discovery of neutrino oscillations, which shows that neutrinos have mass.”
Center News 65 NERSC’s connection to this Nobel Prize is through SNO, a huge neutrino detector based in Sudbury, Ontario. The observatory is located in an old copper mine 2 km underground to shield it as much as possible from the noise background of particle interactions that take place on Earth’s surface. The SNO detector was turned on in 1999, and from the earliest days SNO data was transferred to NERSC, where the center’s PDSF cluster was used for what became known as the “West Coast Analysis.” When the discovery of neutrino flavor mixing in solar neutrinos was published in 2001 in Physical Review Letters, NERSC’s role was well established and recognized by scientists working on the project; in fact, they presented NERSC’s PDSF team with a signed and framed copy of the journal article. The SNO experiment wound down in 2006, but the data continues to prove invaluable. To assure its integrity and safekeeping, NERSC was chosen to house the data archive. Archiving and moving all the data to NERSC required a close collaboration between SNO, NERSC and ESnet. When the Nobel Prize for Physics was announced in October 2015, one of the leads on the SNO project, Alan Poon of Berkeley Lab, asked that the following email be distributed to the entire NERSC staff: SNO has been blessed by the top-notch support and facility at NERSC. Without NERSC’s support, SNO would not have been able to process and reconstruct the data, simulate the data and run massive jobs for the physics fits so smoothly and successfully. We appreciate your continual support of our data archive at HPSS. As you can imagine, we want to preserve this precious data set, and once again, NERSC has come to our assistance. Many, many thanks from all of us in SNO. Best, Alan To which Dr. McDonald added in a subsequent email: May I add my thanks to those from Alan. We greatly appreciate your support. Best regards, Art McDonald Art McDonald at Berkeley Lab in November 2015, where he outlined NERSC’s and Berkeley Lab’s contributions to the SNO Collaboration. OpenMSI Wins 2015 R&D 100 Award OpenMSI, the most advanced computational tool for analyzing and visualizing mass spectrometry instruments (MSI) data, was one of seven Berkeley Lab winners of a 2015 R&D 100 award. Oliver Rübel of the Computational Research Division and Ben Bowen of the Environmental Genomics and Systems Biology Division led the development of OpenMSI, with collaboration from NERSC. MSI technology enables scientists to study tissues, cell cultures and bacterial colonies in unprecedented detail at the molecular level. As the mass and spatial resolution of MS instruments increase, so do the number of pixels in MS images and data size. Nowadays, MSI datasets range from
Page 1 and 2:
National Energy Research Scientific
Page 3 and 4:
National Energy Research Scientific
Page 5 and 6:
Table of Contents 3 User Support an
Page 7 and 8:
Director's Note 5 In parallel with
Page 9 and 10:
NERSC User/Usage Demographics 7 201
Page 11 and 12:
Page 13 and 14:
Page 15 and 16: Innovations 13 Paving the Way to Ex
Page 17 and 18: Innovations 15 full benefit of the
Page 19 and 20: Innovations 17 Data-Intensive Scien
Page 21 and 22: Innovations 19 installing it on Cra
Page 23 and 24: Innovations 21 The Palomar 48-inch
Page 25 and 26: Innovations 23 distributed data cen
Page 27 and 28: Innovations 25 Operational Excellen
Page 29 and 30: Innovations 27 Environmental Data C
Page 31 and 32: Innovations 29 Despite being target
Page 33 and 34: Science Highlights 31 Simulations L
Page 35 and 36: Science Highlights 33 33 Stabilizin
Page 37 and 38: Science Highlights 35 BISICLES Ice
Page 39 and 40: Science Highlights 37 Supernova Hun
Page 41 and 42: Science Highlights 39 Celeste: A Ne
Page 43 and 44: Science Highlights 41 What Causes E
Page 45 and 46: Science Highlights 43 What Ignites
Page 47 and 48: Science Highlights 45 Could Materia
Page 49 and 50: User Support and Outreach 47 NERSC
Page 51 and 52: User Support and Outreach 49 Other
Page 53 and 54: User Support and Outreach 51 Prelim
Page 55 and 56: User Support and Outreach 53 A view
Page 57 and 58: User Support and Outreach 55 Additi
Page 59 and 60: User Support and Outreach 57 The co
Page 61 and 62: Center News 59 NERSC’s New Home:
Page 63 and 64: Center News 61 performance of 1.28
Page 65: Center News 63 long-term climate da
Page 69 and 70: Center News 67 NERSC 2016 AWARD FOR
Page 71 and 72: Center News 69 In addition to the n
Page 73 and 74: NERSC Director’s Reserve 71 PROJE
Page 75 and 76: Publications 73 Publications Stayin
Page 77 and 78: Appendices 75 Appendix B Office of
Page 79 and 80: Appendices 77 InN Indium Nitride Me
Page 81: DISCLAIMER This document was prepar
show all

National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?