Berkeley Labs Official Open Center to Advance Scientific Dis
Source: Autumn Johnson
A new scientific computing center opened Thursday at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, U.S. Department of Energy officials said. Shyh Wang Hall opened on the lab’s campus at One Cyclotron Road with comments by the DOE’s Under Secretary of Science and Energy Lynn Orr, according to DOE officials. The new center will house a global leading supercomputing center, a network to connect scientists and programs in computer science and applied mathematics, DOE officials said.
“With over 5,000 computational users each year, Berkeley Lab leads in providing scientific computing to the national energy and science user community, and the dedication of Wang Hall for the computing program at Berkeley Lab will allow this community to continue to flourish,” Orr said in a statement.
The center is named after Shyh Wang, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley who was known for research into semiconductors, magnetic resonances and semiconductor lasers, DOE officials said. Wang spent 34 years at the university, according to DOE officials.
The center will house the lab’s Computing Sciences organization, which is made up of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, the DOE’s Energy Sciences Network and the lab’s Computational Research Division, DOE officials said. UC Berkeley researchers will collaborate with scientists at the center, which the University of California financed, according to DOE officials. The cost of the 149,000 square foot building was $143 million, DOE officials said.
“The collaboration between UC Berkeley and Berkeley Lab to make this building happen will go a long ways towards advancing our knowledge of the world around us,” UC President Janet Napolitano said in a statement.
DOE officials touted the building’s design, which draws in natural air to cool computers rather than using mechanical cooling, DOE officials said. The building also has an isolated floor designed to protect the computers and staff during an earthquake, according to NERSC officials.
The floor is mounted on a substructure on casters and uses a dampening mechanism to handle quakes, which could occur on the nearby Hayward Fault, NERSC officials said. Two Cray supercomputers in the center will crunch numbers for scientists, according to DOE officials. The first part of supercomputer Cori, a Cray XC40, is already in place, DOE officials said. Edison, NERSC’s flagship computer, can do more than two quadrillion calculations each second, according to DOE officials. A quadrillion is a one followed by 15 zeros or 1,000 trillion.
| }
|