Boxitecture

2025 Center Street Berkeley Parking Structure to be Rebuilt With 271 More Parking Spaces

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That's actually hilarious.  Berkeley gave the Lab a serious hard time over the number of cars and parking spaces on the Hill.  Now Berkeley, the City itself, is going to be adding even more.  snork.

2001 Fourth Street, Berkeley Rendering

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2211 Harold Way, Berkeley, California Renderings

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Walking Away

BRETT: Berkeley Robot for the Elimination of Tedious Tasks

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have developed algorithms that enable robots to learn motor tasks through trial and error using a process that more closely approximates the way humans learn, marking a major milestone in the field of artificial intelligence.

They demonstrated their technique, a type of reinforcement learning, by having a robot complete various tasks -- putting a clothes hanger on a rack, assembling a toy plane, screwing a cap on a water bottle, and more -- without pre-programmed details about its surroundings.

"What we're reporting on here is a new approach to empowering a robot to learn," said Professor Pieter Abbeel in UC Berkeley's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences. "The key is that when a robot is faced with something new, we won't have to reprogram it. The exact same software, which encodes how the robot can learn, was used to allow the robot to learn all the different tasks we gave it."

Robopoclypse now.  ;)

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Will it Ever be Built?

Cool, but probably not look at the second image.  The group must be flipping the bird at Berkeley.

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2600 Shattuck, Berkeley Rendering

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2539 Telegraph, Berkeley Rendering

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1951 Shattuck, Berkeley Rendering

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2211 Harold, Berkeley, California Rendering

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LBNL Proposing new Laser-Plasma Accelerator

It took every inch of the Large Hadron Collider's 17-mile length to accelerate particles to energies high enough to discover the Higgs boson. Now, imagine an accelerator that could do the same thing in, say, the length of a football field. Or less.

That is the promise of laser-plasma accelerators, which use lasers instead of high-power radio-frequency waves to energize electrons in very short distances. Scientists have grappled with building these devices for two decades, and a new theoretical study predicts that this may be easier than previously thought.

The authors are Carlo Benedetti, Carl Schroeder, Eric Esarey, and Wim Leemans, physicists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Berkeley Lab Laser Accelerator (BELLA) Center. Their paper, "Plasma wakefields driven by an incoherent combination of laser pulses: A path towards high-average power laser-plasma accelerators," appears in the May Special Issue of Physics of Plasmas, from AIP Publishing.

If their models prove correct, they could help lower the cost of high-energy physics research -- the Large Hadron Collider cost $9 billion -- as well as many other industrial and medical applications of accelerators.

Laser-plasma accelerators work by blasting a powerful laser beam into a plasma, a cloud of unattached electrons and ions.

"The effect is like the wake of boat speeding down a lake. If the wake was big enough, a surfer could ride it," Leemans, who heads the BELLA Center, explained.

"Imagine that the plasma is the lake and the laser is the motorboat. When the laser plows through the plasma, the pressure created by its photons pushes the electrons out of the way. They wind up surfing the wake, or wakefield, created by the laser as it moves down the accelerator," he said.

The fast moving electrons leave the heavy ions behind. As they separate, they create gigantic electric fields, 100 to 1,000 times larger than those in conventional accelerators.

This is how they accelerate electrons so rapidly. For example, Stanford's Linear Accelerator Center takes two miles to drive an electron to 50 billion electron volts (GeV). Leemans' experimental laser-plasma accelerator takes electrons to more than 1 GeV in slightly more than 1 inch.

It takes a lot of laser power to generate a wakefield. For example, BELLA's petawatt (1 quadrillion watts) laser has a 10 meter x 10 meter footprint. It generates 400 times more power than all the world's power plants combined, though only for 40 femtoseconds (40 quadrillionths of a second).

Unfortunately, it takes BELLA's laser a full second to recharge and send a second pulse. High-energy physics research requires tens of thousands of pulses per second. Many other applications would benefit from multiple pulses per second.

BELLA's laser has the highest repetition rate of any petawatt laser in the world. Building a faster petawatt laser would require a heroic feat of engineering.

Several European researchers have suggested using an array of smaller lasers to produce one enormous pulse. Since less powerful lasers recharge faster, they could produce hundreds or even thousands of pulses per second and sustain a wakefield over many meters.

The hurdle they needed to overcome was how to synchronize hundreds of lasers so they all pulsed within less than a femtosecond of one another.

Such precision would be expensive and presents serious technical problems. But the concept of combining lasers got Leemans' team thinking.

What if the beam was not perfect? What if it were just good enough to rapidly raise the photon pressure on the electrons? Could we get away with it, they wondered.

According to the model presented in Physics of Plasmas, they could. Leemans compares it to pushing a swing.

"Instead of one big push, we would give it many smaller pushes at roughly the same time. It's not quite perfect, but the swing doesn't really care. It averages over all these little pushes and up it goes."

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1974 University Rendering (Berkeley)

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2129 Shattuck, Berkeley Rendering

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Does Money Make You Mean? In the SF Bay Area, at least, YES!

Hotel Project at Shattuck and Center in Berkeley Rendering

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2501 Haste, Berkeley: Gorgeous, but Probably Won't be Built

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Higby Rendering for Corner of Ashby & San Pablo, in Berkeley

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Berkeley, Stanford Nobel Prize Rivalry Continues

Schekman is ours. Sudhof is Stanford.  Congratz, gentlemen. 

The prize race continues.

Performance Analysis Gap: Processor Complexity Keeps Climbing – Developers Are More Naïve Than Ever

Performance Analysis Gap: Processor Complexity Keeps Climbing – Developers Are More Naïve Than Ever

Berkeley Lab – Computing Sciences Seminar

Date: Thursday, August 8, 2013

Time: 10:00am - 11:00am

Location: Bldg. 50F, Room 1647

Speaker: Wucherl Yoo

Computer Science Department

University of Illinois

Abstract:

The performance analysis gap is widening as processor complexity keeps climbing and developers are becoming more naïve than ever. Seemingly suitable programs can run correctly, but may suffer from hidden hardware bottlenecks that can severely hinder performance. Performance Monitoring Unit (PMU) events can provide programmers with unique and powerful insights into performance problems in their programs, but interpreting these events has been a significant challenge. While the conventional performance tuning tools can measure and visualize hardware events, they lack automatic identification of dominant resource bottlenecks and significant manual effort is required from experts to interpret the hardware events. 

ARGH!

IDK if I can make it.  I really ought to, but,,,