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Rachel McDowell

Rachel McDowell is a science writer for the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility.

Science

Two Finalists Nominated for Gordon Bell Special Prize for COVID-19 Work on Summit

Every year at the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC), one deserving team is awarded the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Gordon Bell Prize to recognize an outstanding achievement in high-performance computing (HPC). Winners are chosen based on the demonstrated innovativeness of their algorithm development…
Rachel McDowell
November 18, 2020
Technology

OLCF Launches New User Portal, myOLCF

In the past, users of the supercomputing resources at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) have accessed information about their computing projects through a static portal that provides metrics and statistics upon login. Although this information is helpful from a reporting perspective, users have been unable to control certain…
Rachel McDowell
November 10, 2020
Technology

NASA Team Releases Mars Landing Simulation Data to Encourage New Research into Spacecraft Descent Technologies

Scientists at NASA aim to one day land giant payloads on Mars, but safely descending passengers, flight crew, and other equipment in an atmosphere much thinner than Earth’s poses a significant challenge. Scientists studying potential Mars landing technologies need large-scale computational resources to model such scenarios, and to accurately model…
Rachel McDowell
September 23, 2020
People

Powering Frontier

The US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is poised to deliver Frontier, its first exascale supercomputer, next year. Exascale systems are capable of operating at 1 quintillion calculations per second, requiring a significant amount of power and generating substantial amounts of heat. Before the engineers working…
Rachel McDowell
September 23, 2020
Science

Summit Helps Predict Molecular Breakups

Designing materials with certain properties is the first step to making computer chips that can store more information, superconductors that could help to solve the world’s energy problems, and drugs that work more efficiently in the human body. The transition metals in the periodic table of elements are crucial to…
Rachel McDowell
June 24, 2020
People

Cracking the Linux Code with the OLCF’s Ketan Maheshwari

The OLCF’s Ketan Maheshwari developed a tutorial on Linux productivity tools that provides Linux users with practical application techniques for the operating system. Image Credit: Jason Richards, ORNL The Linux operating system is used to run processes both on the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility’s (OLCF’s) Summit—the world’s most powerful…
Rachel McDowell
June 24, 2020
Science

Knocking Out Drug Side Effects with Supercomputing

Psychedelic drugs could be effective in treating psychiatric disorders such as depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, but medical use of these drugs is limited by the hallucinations they cause. “What if we could redesign drugs to keep their benefits while eliminating their unwanted side effects?” asked Ron Dror, an associate…
Rachel McDowell
June 4, 2020
Technology

OLCF Offers New Workload Capabilities with Slate Service

The large scientific simulations users at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) run on the center’s IBM AC922 Summit supercomputer almost always require other attendant tasks to fully realize their scientific impact. Resources for these additional “workflow” tasks can be scarce, and pushing this work to the login or…
Rachel McDowell
March 27, 2020
Technology

New Job Step Viewer Tool Captures Job Launching on Summit

Before computational users launch large scientific jobs on the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility’s (OLCF’s) IBM AC922 Summit supercomputer, they need to understand how they will use the full power of the machine’s hybrid nodes, including memory layout, CPU, and GPU usage. Now, they have a way to see this…
Rachel McDowell
March 27, 2020