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Rachel McDowell

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

Science

ORNL Scientists Tap into AI to Put a New Spin on Neutron Experiments

Scientists seek to use quantum materials—those that have correlated order at the subatomic level—for electronic devices, quantum computers, and superconductors. Quantum materials owe many of their properties to the physics that is occurring on the smallest scales, physics that is fully quantum mechanical. Some materials, such as complex magnetic materials,…
Rachel McDowell
March 27, 2020
Technology

Simulating the Stars at Exascale Requires HIP Solutions

As GPU architectures have become the standard for scientific computing, application teams have had to retrofit their scientific codes to run on new systems. Even teams with codes that have been re-engineered for GPUs must continually adapt them for new architectures. Evan Schneider of Princeton University, though, began developing her…
Rachel McDowell
March 5, 2020
Science

Machine Learning for Better Drug Design

When Harel Weinstein and his team at the Joan & Sanford I. Weill Medical College (Weill Cornell Medicine) of Cornell University set out to learn the molecular mechanisms of drugs, they weren’t expecting to train computers to analyze some of the most complex data in pharmacology. In fact, they really…
Rachel McDowell
February 21, 2020
Science

Modeling Every Building in America Starts with Chattanooga

Buildings use 40 percent of America’s primary energy and 75 percent of its electricity, which can jump to 80 percent when a majority of the population is at home using heating or cooling systems and the seasons reach their extremes. The US Department of Energy’s (DOE)’s Building Technologies Office (BTO),…
Rachel McDowell
November 13, 2019
Science

Can a UNICORN Outrun Earthquakes?

Each year, anywhere from a few hundred to tens of thousands of deaths are attributed to the catastrophic effects of major earthquakes. Apart from ground shaking, earthquake hazards include landslides, dam ruptures, flooding, and worse—if the sea floor is suddenly displaced during an earthquake, it can trigger a deadly tsunami.…
Rachel McDowell
November 13, 2019
Science

AI for Plant Breeding in an Ever-Changing Climate

How might artificial intelligence (AI) impact agriculture, the food industry, and the field of bioengineering? Dan Jacobson, a research and development staff member in the Biosciences Division at the US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), has a few ideas. For the past 5 years, Jacobson and…
Rachel McDowell
November 13, 2019
Events

ORNL Staff Highlight OpenACC’s Role in HPC at Annual Meeting

The OLCF’s Director of Science Jack Wells gave a keynote talk at the 2019 OpenACC Annual Meeting last week about the OLCF’s experiences with and plans for OpenACC in past and future HPC architectures. OpenMP and OpenACC are widely used directive-based application program interfaces (APIs) that allow computer scientists and…
Rachel McDowell
September 12, 2019
GE's GENESIS solver (right) preserves many more wake details of interest in the flow field compared with a commercial solver (left). Image Credit: University of KansasScience

GPUs Power GE Code at OLCF Hackathons

The ability to simulate turbulent phenomena using high-performance computing (HPC) can provide industry with important insights for efficient engine design. Second only to the ability to perform these critical simulations is the speed at which they run. If a company can run a model more quickly, the number of possible…
Rachel McDowell
September 12, 2019
Image Credit: Carlos Jones, ORNLScience

ORNL-VA Collaboration Targets Veteran Suicide Epidemic

More than 6,000 veterans died by suicide in 2016, and from 2005 to 2016, the rate of veteran suicides in the United States increased by more than 25 percent. Suicide prevention is the US Department of Veterans Affairs’ (VA’s) highest priority—so much so that in recent years, the VA has…
Rachel McDowell
August 29, 2019
Image Credit: iStockScience

From Simulation to Automation in a Data-Rich World

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. Long before the first computers were invented, intelligent robots appeared in myths, stories, and other works of fiction. In recent years,…
Rachel McDowell
August 29, 2019
People

Second “Introduce Your Daughter to AI” Event Is a Hit

The Women in Computing (WiC) networking group at the US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) hosted its second “Introduce Your Daughter to AI” workshop on June 7. With 31 ORNL employees attending with their daughters ages 12 to 17, this year’s event topped last year’s attendance…
Rachel McDowell
June 28, 2019
People

ORNL Staff Plug into Tech Day

Last month, the US Department of Labor’s (DOL’s) Tech Day 2019 put federal agencies’ emerging technologies on display for the public, highlighting developments in 3D printing, cybersecurity, virtual reality, and more. Researchers from the US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) were among the participants in the…
Rachel McDowell
June 12, 2019