Berkeley Announces International Center for Computational Science

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Berkeley Lab today announced a new multinational research organization called the International Center for Computational Science [ICCS].  They are partnering with the likes of the University of Heidelberg in Germany and the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in China in order to address the challenge of gathering, analyzing, storing and sharing the virtual explosion of scientific data resulting from experiments and simulations.

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Over the last decade we have seen a tremendous growth in computational science, and learned as a community that fastest progress will be made in large-scale collaborations,” said Horst Simon, associate laboratory director for Computing Sciences at Berkeley Lab and adjunct professor at UC Berkeley. “Therefore it is only natural to forge international collaborations to address the most challenging problems. ICCS is a step in this direction, combining projects on three continents to advance our scientific knowledge and the ability to use advanced architectures.”

One of the primary objectives of the new group is to develop scientific solutions that are easily consumed by the user community and provide energy efficient, performance conscious implementations across a wide range of applications.

The center is a bridge between China, Germany and the USA. Through this bridge we will exchange knowledge, resources and personnel to work together on new technologies, as well as enhance our mutual cultural respect and understanding,” said Spurzem, who has a joint appointment at the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Science.

The next steps for ICCS include hiring two researchers under the NSF project and to present a locally based summer session of the Virtual School of Computational Science and Engineering, a five-day course to learn how to use multicore devices for scientific computing, scale parallel code to tens of thousands, of CPU cores, handle large data volumes and more.

Although high-performance computing for simulations, instrumentation and data analysis is a critical next step in scientific quests, the challenges of adopting HPC are steeped in unfamiliarity with rapidly changing technologies,” said Hemant Shukla, a Berkeley Lab physicist and co-founder of the center. “Our goal is to enable broad range of scientific enquiry at various stages by developing real world solutions and engaging the wider scientific community, especially the younger generation.”

For more info, check out their new website here.