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Jonathan Hines

Jonathan Hines is a science writer for the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility.

In this visualization from David Pugmire at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a team led by Jeroen Tromp at Princeton University is imaging the interior of the Earth with adjoint tomography.Science

A Data-Driven Journey to the Center of the Earth

In a farewell nod to Titan, scheduled to be decommissioned in August 2019, we present a short series of features highlighting some of Titan’s impactful contributions to scientific research. In Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth, an impatient geology professor leads a subterranean expedition in search of…
Jonathan Hines
July 5, 2019
Science

CAAR Accepting Application Team Proposals for Frontier System

As details about the Frontier supercomputer emerge, the US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) is seeking partnerships with select applications teams to develop scientific applications for highly effective use on the Frontier system. Through its Center for Accelerated Application Readiness (CAAR), the OLCF will partner…
Jonathan Hines
May 7, 2019
Science

Solving A Beta Decay Puzzle

OAK RIDGE, Tenn., March 11, 2019—An international collaboration including scientists at the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) solved a 50-year-old puzzle that explains why beta decays of atomic nuclei are slower than what is expected based on the beta decays of free neutrons. The findings, published…
Jonathan Hines
March 12, 2019
Technology

ORNL Adds Powerful AI Appliances to Computing Portfolio

(From left to right) Cole Freniere and Michael Reynolds of Microway, Alex Volkov of NVIDIA, and Chris Layton and Brian Zachary of ORNL pose with a newly arrived DGX-2. The NVIDIA appliances connect ORNL researchers with a platform that excels at machine learning, a type of artificial intelligence that could…
Jonathan Hines
February 6, 2019
Technology

Network Enhancement Strengthens Ties Between OLCF, ESnet

ESnet provides services to more than 40 DOE research sites, including the entire national laboratory system, its major scientific instruments, and its supercomputing facilities such as the OLCF. The network permits DOE-funded scientists to productively collaborate with partners around the world. If data is the lifeblood of a scientific computing…
Jonathan Hines
January 17, 2019
Science

Breaching the Biomass Problem

In a farewell nod to Titan, scheduled to be decommissioned in August 2019, we present a short series of features highlighting some of Titan’s impactful contributions to scientific research. https://vimeo.com/307039163 A visualization of a cellulose fiber (green) interacting with lignin (brown). Using supercomputers like the OLCF’s Cray XK7 Titan, ORNL…
Jonathan Hines
December 20, 2018
People

GPU Hackathon Places Summit within Reach for Visiting Teams

Visiting teams representing academia, industry, and government participated in this year’s OLCF GPU Hackathon, held the week of October 22 in downtown Knoxville. Some teams used the time to prepare codes for the IBM AC922 Summit system. In less than 10 years, GPUs have become a proven engine of scientific…
Jonathan Hines
December 3, 2018
People

Teaching and Learning

Tom Papatheodore, an OLCF high-performance computing engineer and member of the User Assistance and Outreach Group, connects users to the resources and training materials they need to do cutting-edge computational science. “A big part of the reason I enjoy my job is because I get to be a part of…
Jonathan Hines
December 3, 2018
Science

Computing Genes to Support Living Clean

ORNL computational systems biologist Dan Jacobson, left, and OLCF computational scientist Wayne Joubert are part of a team that was named a finalist for the 2018 Gordon Bell Prize for its work to advance genomic science on the Summit supercomputer. This article is part of a series covering the finalists…
Jonathan Hines
October 15, 2018
People

Mixed Precision: A Strategy for New Science Opportunities

OLCF computational scientist Wayne Joubert successfully exploited the Summit supercomputer’s low-precision capabilities to accelerate a genomics application to exascale speeds. Since the days of vector supercomputers, computational scientists have relied on high-precision arithmetic to accurately solve a wide range of problems, from modeling nuclear reactors to predicting supernova physics to…
Jonathan Hines
October 9, 2018
Summit supercomputerScience

Uncharted Territory

Ambitious supercomputers attract ambitious users. After debuting as the world’s fastest supercomputer in June, the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility’s (OLCF’s) 200-petaflop Summit is already demonstrating its utility for solving complex computational challenges with unprecedented speed. A recent announcement by the Association for Computing Machinery lists five Summit users among…
Jonathan Hines
September 17, 2018
George OstrouchovPeople

Preaching pbdR

Since bursting onto the scene in the early ’90s, high-performance computing (HPC) has become the most productive method for exploring ambitious problems in science that require substantial computational power. Yet in 2018, researchers in the statistical sciences—fields ranging from biology to economics to sociology—have yet to fully embrace the power…
Jonathan Hines
August 29, 2018
Technology

OLCF Welcomes Wombat Test System

Concocting the next big thing in high-performance computing (HPC) often starts with giving the latest thing a try. In that spirit, the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) recently deployed Wombat, the center’s newest Arm-based test bed. The 16-node, single-rack computing cluster is the OLCF’s latest foray into Arm technology,…
Jonathan Hines
August 7, 2018
Technology

ORNL’s Summit Supercomputer Named World’s Fastest

OAK RIDGE, Tenn.  – The US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory is once again officially home to the fastest supercomputer in the world, according to the TOP500 List, a semiannual ranking of the world’s fastest computing systems. The recently launched Summit supercomputer was announced as No. 1 today…
Jonathan Hines
June 25, 2018
Technology

Genomics Code Exceeds Exaops on Summit Supercomputer

Researchers at the US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory broke the exascale barrier, achieving a peak throughput of 1.88 exaops—faster than any previously reported science application—while analyzing genomic data on the recently launched Summit supercomputer. The ORNL team achieved the feat, the equivalent to carrying out nearly 2…
Jonathan Hines
June 8, 2018
People

Faces of Summit: Succeeding by Leading

OLCF program director and project director for Summit, Buddy Bland has spent countless hours communicating and problem-solving with the system’s various stakeholders, including ORNL, DOE, and technology vendors IBM and NVIDIA, among others. On any given day at ORNL, Bland can be found participating in a project review, fielding updates…
Jonathan Hines
June 8, 2018
Industry

Boosting Industry with OpenACC

This image shows a visualization of a turbomachinery problem conducted by Ramgen Power Systems using Fine/Turbo, a computational fluid dynamics application created by software company Numeca and accelerated using OpenACC directives. One of the biggest hurdles for users who want to take advantage of accelerated computing is the time required…
Jonathan Hines
May 29, 2018
Science

Assessing the Cost of Air Pollution

A new air quality model designed to estimate the costs of air pollution on human health received a boost in its early development from computing time at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), a US Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science User Facility at DOE’s Oak Ridge National…
Jonathan Hines
April 16, 2018
Science

A Problem with Polymer Theory

Researchers at the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences, a US Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science User Facility located at DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), used high-performance computing to verify experiments that challenge a 40-year-old theory in soft-matter physics. The findings, published in ACS Macro Letters, add to…
Jonathan Hines
April 16, 2018