The laser that zaps rocks on Mars is commanded by a talented group of engineers and scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory—who also happen to all be women, a rarity in the engineering field. “It’s unusual, simply because engineering still tends to be male-dominated,” said Nina Lanza, a planetary scientist on the team who has…
Scientific Computing in the Cloud Gets down to Earth
In a groundbreaking effort, seismology researchers have conducted a continent-scale survey for seismic signatures of industrial activity in the Amazon Web Services commercial cloud (AWS), then rapidly downloaded the results without storing raw data or needing a local supercomputer. “Using a traditional workflow, to download-store-calculate on a desktop, this work would’ve taken more than 40…