en-us Sun, 19 May 2013 17:00 EDT DOE Pulse - Research Highlights http://www.ornl.gov/info/news/pulse/ DOE Pulse highlights work being done at the Department of Energy's national laboratories. DOE's laboratories house world-class facilities where more than 30,000 scientists and engineers perform cutting-edge research spanning DOE's science, energy, National security and environmental quality missions. webmaster@ornl.gov Oak Ridge National Laboratory http://www.ornl.gov/info/news/pulse/ http://www.ornl.gov/ornlhome/rss/doe_pulse.gif Sun, 19 May 2013 17:00:00 EDT LLNL's Maya Gokhale creates computational sleuthing tools Computer scientist Maya Gokhale of DOE's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory enjoys reading mysteries in her leisure time, which is not surprising given her aptitude for computational sleuthing, notably finding the proverbial ‘needle in the haystack,' the key nugget of information buried in the avalanche of data today's supercomputers produce. "Not only is the amount of data being generated growing exponentially," Gokhale told LLNL's Science & Technology Review in 2012, "but when the raw data are analyzed, more data ' called ‘metadata' ' are generated as well. It's truly an issue of ‘drowning in data.'" Recently named a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff by Lab Director Parney Albright, Gokhale leads a group developing data-intensive computing architectures and techniques for addressing the "data overload" problem. This involves the synergy of multiple disciplines including computer science, applied mathematics, and statistics. Full Story Feature--> Feature Makeover Puts CHARMM Back in Business Biofuels scientists are asking more complex questions about how molecules spin, bond, and break when enzymes attack plants ' all in the name of quickening the process of turning biomass into fuels for the sake of cleaner air and better energy security. They're the kinds of questions that require trillions of mathematical operations each second on supercomputers. But, software engineers hadn't been able to keep up with the ever-increasing demands of the scientists and the growing capabilities of modern supercomputers. That is, until unique work at DOE's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) supercharged an essential decades-old software program to run on a single high performance computer such as the new petascale computer at NREL's Energy Systems Integration Facility. Software engineers at NREL have reworked codes and algorithms on the CHARMM (Chemistry at Harvard Molecular Mechanics) program to allow it to simulate molecular motion with millions to billions of steps of computation. It does so by simulating nanoseconds to microseconds of molecular motion, which takes days of computing time. Full Story Latest Issues March 30, 2009 March 16, 2009 March 2, 2009 February 16, 2009 February 2, 2009 Janury 19, 2009 January 5, 2009 --> New battery design could help solar and wind energy power the grid /info/news/pulse/no388/story1.shtml Researchers from DOE's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University have designed a low-cost, long-life battery that could enable solar and wind energy to become major suppliers to the electrical grid. Sun, 19 May 2013 17:00:00 EDT Fertilizer that fizzles in a homemade bomb could save lives around the world /info/news/pulse/no388/story2.shtml An engineer at DOE's Sandia National Laboratories who trained U.S. Sun, 19 May 2013 17:00:00 EDT GrayQbTM: A new tool for contamination mapping /info/news/pulse/no388/story3.shtml Nuclear facilities in the midst of cleanup due to normal routine or unexpected incident face a remarkable challenge ' how to safely determine the exact location of radioactive contamination. Sun, 19 May 2013 17:00:00 EDT Combining chromatography, proteomics and database searching identifies hard-to-find heme proteins /info/news/pulse/no388/story4.shtml Iron is a critical part of many biological processes; however, it is often not biologically available or it can be toxic in high quantities.