Conference on Biological Applications of Nuclear Physics July 12-27, 1948, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Associated Universities, Inc., Upton, N. Y. BNL-C-4

In this chapter, the authors discuss issues surrounding High Performance Computing (HPC)-driven science on the example of Peta science Monte Carlo experiments conducted at the Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), one of the US Department of Energy (DOE) High Energy and Nuclear Physics (HENP) research sites. BNL, hosting the only remaining US-based HENP experiments and apparatus, seem appropriate to study the nature of the High-Throughput Computing (HTC) hungry experiments and short historical development of the HPC technology used in such experiments. The development of parallel processors, multiprocessor systems, custom clusters, supercomputers, networked super systems, and hierarchical parallelisms are presented in an evolutionary manner. Coarse grained, rigid Grid system parallelism is contrasted by cloud computing, which is classified within this chapter as flexible and fine grained soft system parallelism. In the process of evaluating various high performance computing options, a clear distinction between high availability-bound enterprise and high scalability-bound scientific computing is made. This distinction is used to further differentiate cloud from the pre-cloud computing technologies and fit cloud computing better into the scientific HPC.

Download Full-text

Recombinant Science: The Birth of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC)

Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences ◽

10.1525/hsns.2008.38.4.535 ◽

2008 ◽

Vol 38 (4) ◽

pp. 535-568 ◽

Cited By ~ 8

Author(s):

Robert P. Crease

Keyword(s):

Nuclear Physics ◽

National Laboratory ◽

Heavy Ion ◽

High Energy ◽

Brookhaven National Laboratory ◽

Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider ◽

Very High Energy ◽

To Come ◽

High Energy Regime

The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory was the first facility to move the subfield of nuclear physics into the relativistic (very high-energy) regime. From the time of its formal proposal in 1984 to the start of its operation in 2000, it anchored a profound reconfiguration of Brookhaven's mission. This article analyzes the process by which RHIC came to seem the best solution to a problem thrust upon the Brookhaven laboratory administration by the planning and funding demands of the early 1980s, which required creative reconfiguration of resources and programs from long-established national laboratories accustomed to pursuing particular kinds of science. The RHIC story is an example of "recombinant science," as Catherine Westfall has labeled it, which does not occur as a natural outgrowth of previous research. In the recombinant science that gave birth to RHIC, the ends as well as the means arose as the result of contingencies and convergences that required researchers from multiple subfields to adapt their intentions and methods, sometimes awkwardly. Against a backdrop of limited budgets, increasing oversight, and competitive claims from other labs and projects, this case study illustrates how many strands had to come together simultaneously in RHIC, including changes in theoretical interest, experimental developments, and the existence of hardware assets---plus leadership and several lucky breaks.

Download Full-text

Quark–gluon soup — The perfectly liquid phase of QCD

International Journal of Modern Physics A ◽

10.1142/s0217751x15300112 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 30 (02) ◽

pp. 1530011 ◽

Cited By ~ 5

Author(s):

Ulrich Heinz

Keyword(s):

Nuclear Physics ◽

National Laboratory ◽

Heavy Ion ◽

Gluon Plasma ◽

Brookhaven National Laboratory ◽

Precise Determination ◽

Relativistic Heavy Ion Collisions ◽

Strongly Coupled ◽

Ion Collisions

At temperatures above about 150 MeV and energy densities exceeding 500 MeV/fm3, quarks and gluons exist in the form of a plasma of free color charges that is about 1000 times hotter and a billion times denser than any other plasma ever created in the laboratory. This quark–gluon plasma (QGP) turns out to be strongly coupled, flowing like a liquid. About 35 years ago, the nuclear physics community started a program of relativistic heavy-ion collisions with the goal of producing and studying QGP under controlled laboratory conditions. This article recounts the story of its successful creation in collider experiments at Brookhaven National Laboratory and CERN and the subsequent discovery of its almost perfectly liquid nature, and reports on the recent quantitatively precise determination of its thermodynamic and transport properties.

Download Full-text

Implementation of ACTS into sPHENIX Track Reconstruction

Computing and Software for Big Science ◽

10.1007/s41781-021-00068-w ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 5 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Joseph D. Osborn ◽

Anthony D. Frawley ◽

Jin Huang ◽

Sookhyun Lee ◽

Hugo Pereira Da Costa ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Nuclear Physics ◽

High Efficiency ◽

National Laboratory ◽

Performance Status ◽

Heavy Ion ◽

High Energy ◽

Brookhaven National Laboratory ◽

Heavy Flavor ◽

Track Reconstruction ◽

Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider

AbstractsPHENIX is a high energy nuclear physics experiment under construction at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL). The primary physics goals of sPHENIX are to study the quark-gluon-plasma, as well as the partonic structure of protons and nuclei, by measuring jets, their substructure, and heavy flavor hadrons in $$p$$ p $$+$$ + $$p$$ p , p + Au, and Au + Au collisions. sPHENIX will collect approximately 300 PB of data over three run periods, to be analyzed using available computing resources at BNL; thus, performing track reconstruction in a timely manner is a challenge due to the high occupancy of heavy ion collision events. The sPHENIX experiment has recently implemented the A Common Tracking Software (ACTS) track reconstruction toolkit with the goal of reconstructing tracks with high efficiency and within a computational budget of 5 s per minimum bias event. This paper reports the performance status of ACTS as the default track fitting tool within sPHENIX, including discussion of the first implementation of a time projection chamber geometry within ACTS.

Download Full-text

Texas A&M US Nuclear DATA Program

EPJ Web of Conferences ◽

10.1051/epjconf/202125208001 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 252 ◽

pp. 08001

Author(s):

Ninel Nica

Keyword(s):

Nuclear Structure ◽

Nuclear Physics ◽

World Literature ◽

National Laboratory ◽

Nuclear Data ◽

Data File ◽

The United States ◽

Brookhaven National Laboratory ◽

The Us ◽

Data Program

Nuclear data evaluation is an independent century-long expert activity accompanying the development of the nuclear physics science. Its goal is to produce periodic surveys of the world literature in order to recommend and maintain the set of the best nuclear data parameters of common use in all basic and applied sciences. After WWII the effort extended and while it became more international it continued to be supported mainly by the US for the benefit of the whole world. The Evaluated Nuclear Structure Data File (ENSDF) is the most comprehensive nuclear structure database worldwide maintained by the United States National Nuclear Data Center(NNDC)at Brookhaven National Laboratory(BNL)and echoed by the IAEA Vienna Nuclear Data Services. Part of the US Nuclear Data Program since 2005 the Cyclotron Institute is one of the important contributors to ENSDF. Since 2018 we became an international evaluation center working in a consortium of peers hosted traditionally by prestigious national institutes as well as universities. In this paper the main stages of the evaluation work are presented in order to facilitate a basic understanding of the process as a guide for our potential users. Our goals are to maintain a good productivity vs. quality performance assuring the currency of the data and participating in the effort of modernizing the structure of ENSDF databases in order to make them compatible with the data-centric paradigms of the future.

Download Full-text

Building national laboratories to meet China's development challenges

National Science Review ◽

10.1093/nsr/nww048 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 3 (3) ◽

pp. 387-391

Author(s):

Jane Qiu

Keyword(s):

New York ◽

Nuclear Physics ◽

Large Scale ◽

National Laboratory ◽

Vice President ◽

Brookhaven National Laboratory ◽

Chinese Government ◽

Physics Institute ◽

Chinese Academy Of Sciences ◽

Academy Of Sciences

Abstract China boasts one of the largest scientific forces in the world, but most research institutes focus on a specialized subject of research—which many say are insufficient to meet the country's complex development needs. As part of the reform of scientific institutions and the implementation of innovation-driven development strategies, the Chinese government plans to build several comprehensive national laboratories that it hopes will further boost its scientific research prowess and to support large-scale projects. To rev up their construction and management, 12 of the world's top national-laboratory experts were invited to share their experiences and insights at the International Seminar on National Laboratory Management, which was held in Beijing on 2 February 2016. In a forum chaired by Tieniu Tan, Vice President of Chinese Academy of Sciences, a panel of four scientists discussed with a packed audience why multi-purpose national laboratories are important, how to manage them effectively, and what the main challenges are. Hong Ding Managing Director of Beijing National Laboratory for Condensed Matter Physics, Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, China Doon Gibbs Director of U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, USA Antonio Masiero Deputy President of the National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN), Italy Joël Mesot Director of Paul Scherrer Institute in Villigen, Switzerland Tieniu Tan (Chair) Vice President of Chinese Academy of Sciences, China

Download Full-text

Chemical and orientational imaging of polymeric samples

Proceedings, annual meeting, Electron Microscopy Society of America ◽

10.1017/s0424820100168074 ◽

1994 ◽

Vol 52 ◽

pp. 68-69

Author(s):

H. Ade ◽

B. Hsiao ◽

G. Mitchell ◽

E. Rightor ◽

A. P. Smith ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Ethylene Terephthalate ◽

National Laboratory ◽

Brookhaven National Laboratory ◽

Carbonyl Groups ◽

Aromatic Rings ◽

Edge Structure ◽

X Ray ◽

Scanning Transmission ◽

Polymeric Samples ◽

X Ray Absorption

We have used the Scanning Transmission X-ray Microscope at beamline X1A (X1-STXM) at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) to acquire high resolution, chemical and orientation sensitive images of polymeric samples as well as point spectra from 0.1 μm areas. This sensitivity is achieved by exploiting the X-ray Absorption Near Edge Structure (XANES) of the carbon K edge. One of the most illustrative example of the chemical sensitivity achievable is provided by images of a polycarbonate/pol(ethylene terephthalate) (70/30 PC/PET) blend. Contrast reversal at high overall contrast is observed between images acquired at 285.36 and 285.69 eV (Fig. 1). Contrast in these images is achieved by exploring subtle differences between resonances associated with the π bonds (sp hybridization) of the aromatic groups of each polymer. PET has a split peak associated with these aromatic groups, due to the proximity of its carbonyl groups to its aromatic rings, whereas PC has only a single peak.

Download Full-text