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MADNESS Named R&D 100 Winner

By June 29, 2011April 3rd, 2013People2 min read

OLCF researchers a part of team recognized for work on software package

A team led by ORNL’s Robert Harrison has been awarded an R&D 100 Award by R&D Magazine.

The team’s award stems from the development of the Multiresolution Adaptive Numerical Environment for Scientific Simulations, or MADNESS, submitted and developed by ORNL with a team led by Harrison and George Fann. The team also includes Rebecca Hartman-Baker, also a member of Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility’s (OLCF’s) Scientific Computing Group.

MADNESS is a free, open-source, general purpose, user-friendly software package for the development scientific simulations from laptops to massively parallel supercomputers. MADNESS utilizes the latest parallel computing and solution methodologies to solve many dimensional integral and differential equations accurately and precisely for real-world problems. MADNESS provides a new platform for scientists and engineers to easily create new applications with assurance in the exactness of their results. Through the 2011 INCITE program, Harrison and his team have an allocation of 75 million hours on OLCF’s Jaguar to model chemical catalysts and interfaces at the petascale.

Each year R&D Magazine selects 100 technological products that highlight the most outstanding advances in technology. These awards, sometimes referred to as the “Academy Awards of Science,” are chosen by an expert panel of independent judges and the editors of R&D Magazine.

This is Harrison’s second R&D 100 Award. As the principal architect of NWChem, a chemistry code that was included in the software package MS3, Harrison was part of an R&D 100 team in 1999.

“I want to congratulate this year’s R&D 100 award winners,” Energy Secretary Steven Chu said. “The Department of Energy’s national laboratories are at the forefront of innovation, and it is gratifying to see their work recognized once again. The cutting-edge research and development done in our national labs is helping to meet our energy challenges, strengthen our national security and enhance our economic competitiveness.”