With a boost from the Titan supercomputer, a Berkeley Lab group works the angles on X-rays to analyze thin films of interest for the next generation of nanodevices.
Articles written by Tony Fitzpatrick
About the Author
Tony Fitzpatrick writes about a wide variety of topics in science, technology and the environmental and agricultural sciences. His stories, articles and essays have appeared in newspapers and magazines nationwide. He is author of Signals from the Heartland.
December 2016
May 2016
Multitalented metric
An alternative computing benchmark emerges to reflect scientific performance.
November 2014
Universe in a day
A team working on the Titan supercomputer simulates the biggest thing of all in a flash, then shares.
October 2012
Overcoming resistance
To find a path around antibiotic resistance, a team working with the Intrepid supercomputer at Argonne National Laboratory is simulating molecular binding interactions to rapidly vet new infection-fighting candidates.
A timely death
Speed kills, as the slogan says, and in computers what it kills could be disease. Argonne National Laboratory researcher Andrew Binkowski’s calculations of protein structure help find ligands – smaller molecules – that attach to them, to deliver drugs that stop dangerous infections. But without supercomputers it could take months to model a single ligand, […]
July 2012
Twice-stuffed permafrost
A Pacific Northwest National Laboratory computation suggests that the water-gas compounds found in ocean permafrost can provide energy and store it, too – and then trap carbon dioxide.
April 2011
A long view of Gulf oil spill
While others predicted when oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico might reach beaches, ocean modelers at Los Alamos National Laboratory and the National Center for Atmospheric Research asked when gushing oil might exit the Gulf, where it would go and how diluted it’d be, up to a year later.
Tracing CFCs and greenhouse gases
National Center for Atmospheric Research oceanographer Synte Peacock studies “the distribution of various tracers – something that tags a water mass and is carried around by ocean currents – to learn more about ocean circulation in the past and present.” These tracers include carbon and radiocarbon isotopes, paleotracers (fossils from the sea, in sediments and […]
November 2010
In climate modeling, speed matters
A Brookhaven team wants to build the ‘fast physics’ behind clouds, air-suspended particles and precipitation into global climate models.
The wings that fly FASTER
If FASTER can be considered a jet that speeds global climate modelers to analyze fast physics processes, its wings are the testbed and associated research. The testbed integrates two major “fast” components: a single column model (SCM), a roughly 100 kilometer by 100 km column that complements traditional global climate models; and a numerical weather […]
