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FollowNERSC User James Drake Receives 2010 APS Maxwell Prize for Plasma Physics
January 31, 2011
Long-time NERSC user James Drake has been awarded the 2010 James Clerk Maxwell Prize for Plasma Physics, the highest honor bestowed to plasma physicists by the American Physical Society (APS). Drake, a Professor of Physics at the University of Maryland, has been a user of NERSC supercomputer systems for over a decade. He and his Maryland colleagues use NERSC resources to focus on two key problems in what is called “magnetic reconnection,” which refers to the breaking and topological rearrangement of magnetic field lines in a plasma.
In 2010 alone Drake and his coworkers reported eight journal publications arising from computations using NERSC resources. Drake is a leading investigator on the NERSC project "Turbulence, Transport and Magnetic Reconnection in High Temperature Plasma," which is funded by the Department of Energy's Office of Fusion Energy Science (FES).
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.
