Data Science in the News

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LLNL, University of California initiative fosters academic partnership

Jan. 19, 2023 - 
A new joint initiative between the LLNL Weapons and Complex Integration (WCI) Directorate and the University of California (UC) is aimed at developing next generation academic leadership with strong and enduring national laboratory connections. The LLNL Early Career UC Faculty Initiative is accepting proposals from untenured, tenure-track faculty at one of 10 UC campuses, soliciting...

Supercomputing’s critical role in the fusion ignition breakthrough

Dec. 21, 2022 - 
On December 5th, the research team at LLNL's National Ignition Facility (NIF) achieved a historic win in energy science: for the first time ever, more energy was produced by an artificial fusion reaction than was consumed—3.15 megajoules produced versus 2.05 megajoules in laser energy to cause the reaction. High-performance computing was key to this breakthrough (called ignition), and HPCwire...

National Ignition Facility achieves fusion ignition

Dec. 13, 2022 - 
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) today announced the achievement of fusion ignition at LLNL—a major scientific breakthrough decades in the making that will pave the way for advancements in national defense and the future of clean power. On Dec. 5, a team at LLNL’s National Ignition Facility (NIF) conducted the first controlled...

Understanding the universe with applied statistics (VIDEO)

Nov. 17, 2022 - 
In a new video posted to the Lab’s YouTube channel, statistician Amanda Muyskens describes MuyGPs, her team’s innovative and computationally efficient Gaussian Process hyperparameter estimation method for large data. The method has been applied to space-based image classification and released for open-source use in the Python package MuyGPyS. MuyGPs will help astronomers and astrophysicists...

New UC Livermore Collaboration Center to expand collaborations and partnerships

Oct. 5, 2022 - 
The three-building Hertz Hall complex on the east side of LLNL has a new look and a new name. Following an extensive nine-month renovation, the buildings now form the University of California Livermore Collaboration Center (UCLCC) and will serve as a University of California (UC) multi-campus hub to expand collaborations and partnerships with three national labs. Upwards of 60 representatives...

ESGF launches effort to upgrade climate projection data system

Oct. 5, 2022 - 
The Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF), a multi-agency initiative that gathers and distributes data for top-tier projections of the Earth’s climate, is preparing a series of upgrades that will make using the data easier and faster while improving how the information is curated. The federation, led by the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in collaboration with Argonne and...

Scientific discovery for stockpile stewardship

Sept. 27, 2022 - 
Among the significant scientific discoveries that have helped ensure the reliability of the nation’s nuclear stockpile is the advancement of cognitive simulation. In cognitive simulation, researchers are developing AI/ML algorithms and software to retrain part of this model on the experimental data itself. The result is a model that “knows the best of both worlds,” says Brian Spears, a...

LLNL to cooperate with University of Utah's one oneAPI Center of Excellence

Sept. 21, 2022 - 
The University of Utah has announced the creation of a new oneAPI Center of Excellence focused on developing portable, scalable and performant data compression techniques. The oneAPI Center will be headed out of the University of Utah’s Center for Extreme Data Management Analysis and Visualization (CEDMAV) and will involve the cooperation of LLNL’s Center for Applied Scientific Computing. It...

S&TR cover story: The ACES in our hand

Sept. 20, 2022 - 
Uranium enrichment is central to providing fuel to nuclear reactors, even those intended only for power generation. With minor modifications, however, this process can be altered to yield highly enriched uranium for use in nuclear weapons. The world’s need for nuclear fuel coexists with an ever-present danger—that a nonnuclear weapons nation-state possessing enrichment technology could...

Lab researchers win top award for machine learning-based approach to ICF experiments

Aug. 4, 2022 - 
The IEEE Nuclear and Plasma Sciences Society (NPSS) announced an LLNL team as the winner of its 2022 Transactions on Plasma Science Best Paper Award for their work applying machine learning to inertial confinement fusion (ICF) experiments. In the paper, lead author Kelli Humbird and co-authors propose a novel technique for calibrating ICF experiments by combining machine learning with...

Panel discussion spotlights COVID-19 R&D

July 19, 2022 - 
The DSI’s career panel series continued on June 28 to highlight some of LLNL’s COVID-19 research projects. Three data scientists—Emilia Grzesiak, Derek Jones, and Priyadip Ray—joined moderator and data scientist Stewart He to talk about their work in drug screening, protein–drug compounds, antibody–antigen sequence analysis, and risk factor identification. He, who earned a PhD in Computer...

Introduction to deep learning for image classification workshop (VIDEO)

July 6, 2022 - 
In addition to its annual conference held every March, the global Women in Data Science (WiDS) organization hosts workshops and other activities year-round to inspire and educate data scientists worldwide, regardless of gender, and to support women in the field. On June 29, LLNL’s Cindy Gonzales led a WiDS Workshop titled “Introduction to Deep Learning for Image Classification.” The abstract...

UC Merced students work with LLNL mentors on potential new drugs to combat COVID-19

June 30, 2022 - 
Students from the University of California, Merced worked with mentors at LLNL to identify drug compounds that could be used to treat COVID-19 during a two-week Data Science Challenge (DSC) that concluded on June 6. For the first time in the DSC series since the COVID-19 pandemic began in 2020, Lab mentors visited the college campus to provide in-person guidance for five teams of UC Merced...

LLNL’s Brase discusses advances by ATOM in accelerating drug discovery pipeline

June 7, 2022 - 
The private-public Accelerating Therapeutic Opportunities in Medicine (ATOM) consortium is showing “significant” progress in demonstrating that HPC and M) tools can speed up the drug discovery process, said Jim Brase, ATOM co-lead and LLNL’s deputy associate director for data science. The consortium currently boasts more than a dozen member organizations, including national laboratories...

CASC team wins best paper at visualization symposium

May 25, 2022 - 
A research team from LLNL’s Center for Applied Scientific Computing won Best Paper at the 15th IEEE Pacific Visualization Symposium (PacificVis), which was held virtually on April 11–14. Computer scientists Harsh Bhatia, Peer-Timo Bremer, and Peter Lindstrom collaborated with University of Utah colleagues Duong Hoang, Nate Morrical, and Valerio Pascucci on “AMM: Adaptive Multilinear Meshes.”...

HPCIC webinar series to highlight LLNL/Hartree Center industry engagement and joint research

May 19, 2022 - 
LLNL and the United Kingdom’s Hartree Centre are launching a new webinar series intended to spur collaboration with industry through discussions on computational science, HPC, and data science. The first Hartree–Livermore joint webinar on Computational Science (HLCS) takes place May 24, where speakers from the Hartree Centre will present industrial collaboration efforts and technical work...

Kevin McLoughlin applies computational biology to complex problems

May 17, 2022 - 
Kevin McLoughlin has always been fascinated by the intersection of computing and biology. His LLNL career encompasses award-winning microbial detection technology, a COVID-19 antiviral drug design pipeline, and work with the ATOM consortium. The appeal for him in these projects lies at the intersection of computing and biology. “I love finding ways to visualize data that reveal relationships...

NNSA and Cornelis Networks to collaborate on next-generation high-performance networking

May 4, 2022 - 
The Next-Generation High Performance Computing Network (NG-HPCN) project for the NNSA’s Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) program will enable NNSA to co-design and partner with Cornelis on development and productization of next-generation interconnect technologies for HPC. The project is led by LLNL for the NNSA Tri-Labs: LLNL, Los Alamos and Sandia national laboratories. The resulting...

Accelerating the path to precision medicine

March 22, 2022 - 
LLNL joined the Transforming Research and Clinical Knowledge in Traumatic Brain Injury (TRACK-TBI) consortium in 2018. The national, multiyear, multidisciplinary effort, led by the University of California at San Francisco in collaboration with Lawrence Berkeley and Argonne national laboratories and other leading research organizations and universities, combines neuroimaging, blood-based...

Livermore WiDS provides forum for women in data science

March 18, 2022 - 
LLNL celebrated the 2022 Global Women in Data Science (WiDS) conference on March 7 with its fifth annual regional event, featuring workshops, mentoring sessions and a discussion with LLNL Director Kim Budil, the first woman to hold that role. For the second straight year, the WiDS Livermore event was entirely virtual due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Attendees tuned in to view talks and...