Orbach Presented Souvenir from Seaborg

June 1, 2008

As part of his visit to Berkeley Lab on Friday, May 30, DOE Under Secretary of Science Ray Orbach met with representatives of Computing Sciences. ALD Horst Simon and NERSC Director Kathy Yelick opened the meeting by presenting Orbach with a framed memento from the decommissioned IBM supercomputer Seaborg and thanking him for his support of computational science.The Under Secretary quickly showed his knowledge of computing technology and asked if that was the Power 3 machine, and this led to further technical discussions.

The session also included a presentation by John Shalf on “Green Flash,” the LBNL research project to design a specialized supercomputer for solving leading-edge scientific problems, using the same design techniques that result in the highly efficient processors of battery-powered consumer electronic devices such as cell phones. In a paper published in the May issue of the International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications, Michael Wehner, Lenny Oliker and John Shalf proposed an innovative architecture for modeling climate change with 1-kilometer resolution.

About NERSC and Berkeley Lab
The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) is a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility that serves as the primary high performance computing center for scientific research sponsored by the Office of Science. Located at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, NERSC serves almost 10,000 scientists at national laboratories and universities researching a wide range of problems in climate, fusion energy, materials science, physics, chemistry, computational biology, and other disciplines. Berkeley Lab is a DOE national laboratory located in Berkeley, California. It conducts unclassified scientific research and is managed by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy. »Learn more about computing sciences at Berkeley Lab.