Data Science in the News

Skywing: Open-source software aids collaborative autonomy applications

A new software developed at LLNL, and known as Skywing, provides domain scientists working to protect the nation’s critical infrastructure with a high-reliability, real-time software platform for collaborative autonomy applications. The U.S. modern critical infrastructure—from the electrical grid that sends power to homes to the pipelines that deliver water and natural gas and the railways...

New HPC4EI project to create 'digital twin' models for aerospace manufacturing

A partnership involving LLNL aimed at developing “digital twins” for producing aerospace components is one of six new projects funded under the HPC for Energy Innovation (HPC4EI) initiative, the Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy announced. Sponsored by the HPC4Manufacturing (HPC4Mfg) Program, one of the pillars of HPC4EI, the collaboration between LLNL...

Cognitive simulation supercharges scientific research

Computer modeling has been essential to scientific research for more than half a century—since the advent of computers sufficiently powerful to handle modeling’s computational load. Models simulate natural phenomena to aid scientists in understanding their underlying principles. Yet, while the most complex models running on supercomputers may contain millions of lines of code and generate...

LLNL staff returns to Texas-sized Supercomputing Conference

The 2022 International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC22) returned to Dallas as a large contingent of LLNL staff participated in sessions, panels, paper presentations, and workshops centered around HPC. The world’s largest conference of its kind celebrated its highest in-person attendance since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, with about 11...

LLNL researchers win HPCwire award for applying cognitive simulation to ICF

The high performance computing publication HPCwire announced LLNL as the winner of its Editor’s Choice award for Best Use of HPC in Energy for applying cognitive simulation (CogSim) methods to inertial confinement fusion (ICF) research. The award was presented at the largest supercomputing conference in the world: the 2022 International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking...

Understanding the universe with applied statistics (VIDEO)

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...

Hackathon puts machine learning in the driver’s seat

After 10 years, the “try something new” spirit of LLNL Computing’s seasonal hackathon is alive and well. The fall 2022 event featured an Amazon Web Services (AWS) DeepRacer machine learning (ML) competition, in which participants used a cloud-based racing simulator to train an autonomous race car with reinforcement learning algorithms. Working in teams or individually, drivers trained their...

LLNL celebrates making the impossible possible during 70th anniversary event

On Tuesday, Oct. 11, more than 5,000 LLNL employees gathered to celebrate the Lab’s 70th anniversary. Throughout the first-ever Employee Engagement Day, dozens of the Lab’s facilities and programs opened their doors for employees to get a close-up look at LLNL’s cutting-edge science and technology. It was a celebration of making the impossible possible, bringing a huge number of Lab...

Lab directors discuss LLNL’s past, present and future at ‘historic conversation’

On a historic occasion in the Livermore wine country, the nine living LLNL directors gathered on Sept. 8 to mark the Laboratory’s 70th anniversary, share stories and discuss their vision for the Lab in the coming years. Hosted by the nonprofit Livermore Lab Foundation, the panel brought past directors John Foster Jr., John Nuckolls, Bruce Tarter, George Miller, Parney Albright, and Bill...

Celebrating 10 years of hackathons

Hackathons are one of LLNL Computing’s most enduring and beloved traditions. Although some details have changed since the first hackathon, the premise remains the same: Participants have 24 hours to work on any project of their choosing, whether that’s learning a programming language, building a prototype, developing a new skill, or experimenting with a software framework. They are encouraged...

LLNL team claims top AI award at international symbolic regression competition

An LLNL team claimed a top prize at an inaugural international symbolic regression competition for an artificial intelligence (AI) framework they developed capable of explaining and interpreting real-life COVID-19 data. Hosted by the open source SRBench project at the 2022 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO), the competition had two tracks—synthetic and real-world—and...

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

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...

An open-source, data-science toolkit for energy: GridDS

As the number of smart meters and the demand for energy is expected to increase by 50% by 2050, so will the amount of data those smart meters produce. While energy standards have enabled large-scale data collection and storage, maximizing this data to mitigate costs and consumer demand has been an ongoing focus of energy research. An LLNL team has developed GridDS—an open-source, data-science...

Defending U.S. critical infrastructure from nation-state cyberattacks

For many years, LLNL has been conducting research on cybersecurity, as well as defending its systems and networks from cyberattacks. The Lab has developed an array of capabilities to detect and defend against cyberintruders targeting IT networks and worked with government agencies and private-sector partners to share its cybersecurity knowledge to the wider cyberdefense community. LLNL has...

Panel discussion spotlights COVID-19 R&D

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)

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...

Assured and robust…or bust

The consequences of a machine learning (ML) error that presents irrelevant advertisements to a group of social media users may seem relatively minor. However, this opacity, combined with the fact that ML systems are nascent and imperfect, makes trusting their accuracy difficult in mission-critical situations, such as recognizing life-or-death risks to military personnel or advancing materials...

CASC team wins best paper at visualization symposium

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

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...

Livermore WiDS provides forum for women in data science

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...