Franklin, NERSC's Cray XT4, is among the largest machines on the list of Top 500 supercomputers in the world.
NERSC
is the flagship high performance scientific
computing facility for research sponsored by the U.S. Department
of Energy Office of Science.
NERSC, a national facility located at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, is a world leader in providing resources and services that accelerate scientific discovery through computation.
A small sample of massively parallel scientific computing jobs running right now at NERSC.
Contour plots from Density Functional Theory calculations showing electronic density of states in a model highly mismatched alloy created by adding varying amounts of oxygen (3.125% in (a) and 6.25% in (b)) to a zinc (light blue) selenide (orange) compound. Oxygen atoms are surrounded by the dark-blue high density region.
Computations performed on Franklin have showed that introduction of oxygen impurities into a unique class of semiconductors known as "highly mismatched alloys" (HMAs) can substantially enhance the thermoelectric performance of these materials without the customary degradation in electric conductivity.
Thermoelectric materials involve direct conversion of temperature differences into electric voltage. In a paper published recently in Physical Review Letters, the researchers suggest that their results could allow a variety of abundant materials and new physics for scalable, widely tunable, high-thermopower thermoelectrics.
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