Data Science in the News

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LLNL team achieves largest graph analytics to date

Oct. 28, 2019 - 
Besides broad usage in the tech industry, graph analytics also have national security applications, where algorithms dig through massive datasets to find anomalies or patterns of nefarious activity. It’s in that vein that an LLNL team of computer scientists and applied mathematicians, including Roger Pearce, Geoffrey Sanders, postdoc Benjamin Priest and visiting scholar Trevor Steil, searched...

Successful simulation and visualization coupling proves the power of Sierra

Oct. 22, 2019 - 
As the first National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) production supercomputer backed by GPU- (graphics processing unit) accelerated architecture, Sierra’s acquisition required a fundamental shift in how scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) program their codes to take advantage of the GPUs. The majority of Sierra’s computational power—95 percent of its 125...

Cindy Gonzales forges a new career in data science

Sept. 25, 2019 - 
Through LLNL’s Data Science Immersion Program, Gonzales is now among the Lab’s newest data scientists. For two and a half years, she juggled a demanding workload—coordinating Computing’s Scholar Program, interning with data scientists, learning from mentors, supporting LLNL’s Data Science Institute, and attending college part time—while also having her first child. Read more at LLNL Computing...

Collaboration drives data science workshop

Sept. 12, 2019 - 
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s (LLNL’s) Data Science Institute (DSI) hosted its second annual workshop on July 23–24, 2019. Co-sponsored by the University of California (UC) system, the event drew more than 200 participants to Garré Winery in Livermore. A common theme ran throughout both days: Collaboration is always welcome. Indeed, feedback from last year’s workshop inspired a...

CANDLE illuminates new pathways in fight against cancer

Aug. 16, 2019 - 
As part of the Department of Energy’s role in the fight against cancer, scientists are building tools that use supercomputers to solve problems in entirely new ways. Cancer research provides a complex deep learning challenge that enables DOE to develop new supercomputing capabilities that will, in turn, help scientists address challenges in national security and science. The CANcer...

Hyperion Research announces new winners of HPC Innovation Excellence Awards

June 18, 2019 - 
Hyperion Research  announced the 14th round of recipients of the HPC Innovation Excellence Award at the ISC19 supercomputer industry conference in Frankfurt, Germany. Led by Brian Spears, an LLNL team used the Trinity supercomputer to seek out successful modes of laser-driven fusion implosions by building an enormous database for supervised training of a machine learned surrogate...

NFL comes to Lab to hear latest on TBI research

June 5, 2019 - 
Officials from the National Football League visited LLNL to hear how the Department of Energy’s national laboratories are using high-performance computing and artificial intelligence to advance scientific understanding of traumatic brain injury (TBI). Read more at LLNL News.

Speech generation: siblings collaborate on machine learning hackathon project

May 28, 2019 - 
The first recording that brothers Sam and Joe Eklund, along with their colleague Travis Chambers, played for the audience was a validation. “I endorse Travis as president of the United States of America,” the audio clip played, in a voice resembling Barack Obama’s. The second, in the same voice, was a declaration: “Ice is back, our brand new invention” (from the song “Ice Ice Baby” by...

Researchers explore machine learning to automate sorting of microcapsules in real-time

April 16, 2019 - 
Micro-Encapsulated CO2 Sorbents (MECS) — tiny, reusable capsules full of a sodium carbonate solution that can absorb carbon dioxide from the air — are a promising technology for capturing carbon from the atmosphere. To create the caviar-like objects, scientists run three fluids through a series of microfluidic components to create drops that turn into capsules when exposed to ultraviolet...

International collective of scientists seeks refined understanding of climate system

March 25, 2019 - 
LLNL climate scientists announced the release of new data sets that will provide fresh insights into past and future climate change. Some of these data sets come from model simulations performed at LLNL, one of the more than 40 climate research centers and consortia engaged in next-generation climate change simulations. These results have been produced as part of an international effort to...

Multi-institutional meeting centers on making the 'impossible' possible in cancer research

March 22, 2019 - 
Computer scientists, biomedical engineers, cancer biologists and bioinformaticians from eight Department of Energy national laboratories, health-related government agencies and universities converged at LLNL March 6-7 to discuss ongoing efforts to advance cancer research through computation, identify existing challenges and brainstorm future multidisciplinary projects. Read more at LLNL News...

ESGF conference caps a productive year

Feb. 12, 2019 - 
Members of the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) gathered in Washington, DC, on December 3–7 for the 8th annual conference. The event packed 40 presentations, several plenary sessions, a poster session, guest speakers, an awards ceremony, and an executive committee meeting into the week. The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) delegation comprised 19 staff from the Computation and...

Going deep: Lab employees get an introduction to world of machine learning, neural networks

Feb. 1, 2019 - 
Deep learning is one of the most popular and widely used machine learning methods due to its success with autonomous vehicles, speech recognition and image classification, to name a few emergent technologies. But what exactly is deep learning, and how can it best be applied to Lab projects? LLNL employees discovered the answers during a recent "Deep Learning 101" course, which introduced the...

Dispatches from the fall hackathon

Dec. 18, 2018 - 
This recap of LLNL's seasonal hackathon was provided by the web team that manages several LLNL websites. Mike Goldman, director of the Data Science Institute (DSI), stopped by the team's table during the hackathon to discuss the Open Data Initiative. Read more at LLNL Computing.

Playing video games may help researchers find personalized medical treatment for sepsis

Dec. 18, 2018 - 
A deep learning approach originally designed to teach computers how to play video games better than humans could aid in developing personalized medical treatment for sepsis, a disease that causes about 300,000 deaths per year and for which there is no known cure. LLNL, in collaboration with researchers at the University of Vermont, is exploring how deep reinforcement learning can discover...

A bird's-eye view of computing performance

Dec. 7, 2018 - 
LLNL’s HPC center runs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. HPC performance data is collected from many different sources within the facility and includes metrics on network utilization, rack temperature and humidity, power consumption, application runtimes, and message routing. Such information is essential for understanding how efficiently the facility operates. The analysis tool ScrubJay—named...

DOE machines dominate record-breaking SC18

Nov. 20, 2018 - 
They say everything’s bigger in Texas, and the 30th anniversary of the annual International Conference of High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC18), held Nov. 11-16 in Dallas, did not disappoint. The conference, which broke records for attendees and exhibitors, saw LLNL once again make its presence felt on the world’s biggest HPC stage. For the first time in five...

New computing cluster coming to Livermore

Nov. 8, 2018 - 
LLNL, in partnership with Penguin Computing, AMD and Mellanox Technologies, will accept delivery of Corona, a new unclassified high-performance computing (HPC) cluster that will provide unique capabilities for Lab researchers and industry partners to explore data science, machine learning and big data analytics. Read more at LLNL News.

DSI kicks off 'bull sessions' for data science enthusiasts

Oct. 18, 2018 - 
In upholding its mission of centralizing data science activity at LLNL, the DSI launched an informal event series on July 25, 2018. The new “bull sessions” are intended to facilitate networking, brainstorming, and problem-solving among data scientists and engineers across the Lab. Dan Faissol, a member of DSI’s Data Science Council, states, “We hope these bull sessions will also serve as a...

Machine learning points toward new laser target designs

Oct. 8, 2018 - 
When the Trinity supercomputer at Los Alamos National Laboratory was first coming online, calls went out for research projects that would test—and potentially break—the new system. LLNL researchers answered the call, and their work with Trinity and machine learning could disrupt 40 years of assumptions about inertial confinement fusion (ICF). The project essentially turned Trinity—then a 8.1...