Skip to main content

Coury Turczyn

Coury Turczyn writes communications content for the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF). He has worked in different communications fields over the years, though much of his career has been devoted to local journalism. In between his journalism stints, Coury worked as a web content editor for CNET.com, the G4 cable TV network, and HGTV.com.

Technology

ORNL Researchers Develop Open-Source Mixed-Precision Benchmark Tool

As Frontier, the world’s first exascale supercomputer, was being assembled at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility in 2021, understanding its performance on mixed-precision calculations remained a difficult prospect. That gap in understanding wasn’t an oversight but rather a sign of just how novel supercomputer systems that excel at mixed…
Coury Turczyn
September 22, 2023
Steven Hamilton ORNLTechnology

ExaSMR Nominated for 2023 ACM Gordon Bell Prize

The Exascale Small Modular Reactor effort, or ExaSMR, is a software stack developed over seven years under the Department of Energy’s Exascale Computing Project to produce the highest-resolution simulations of nuclear reactor systems to date. Now, ExaSMR has been nominated for a 2023 Gordon Bell Prize by the Association for Computing Machinery…
Coury Turczyn
September 11, 2023
oxygen-28Science

Oxygen-28 Unbound

Isotopes — atoms of a particular element that have different numbers of neutrons — can be used for a variety of tasks, from tracking climate change to conducting medical research. Investigating rare isotopes, which have extreme neutron-to-proton imbalances and are often created in accelerator facilities, provides scientists with opportunities to…
Coury Turczyn
August 30, 2023
Exascale new frontier OLCF BannerScience

Exascale’s New Frontier: ExaSMR

PI: Steven Hamilton, Oak Ridge National Laboratory In 2016, the US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Exascale Computing Project (ECP) set out to develop advanced software for the arrival of exascale-class supercomputers capable of a quintillion (10¹⁸) or more calculations per second. That meant rethinking, reinventing, and optimizing dozens of scientific…
Coury Turczyn
August 23, 2023
Exascale new frontier OLCF BannerScience

Exascale’s New Frontier: WDMApp

PI: Amitava Bhattacharjee Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory In 2016, the US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Exascale Computing Project (ECP) set out to develop advanced software for the arrival of exascale-class supercomputers capable of a quintillion (10¹⁸) or more calculations per second. That meant rethinking, reinventing, and optimizing dozens of scientific…
Coury Turczyn
August 8, 2023
ORNL quantum workflowScienceTechnology

Shedding Light on Singlet Fission Materials

Using the full capabilities of the Quantinuum H1-1 quantum computer, researchers from the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory not only demonstrated best practices for scientific computing on current quantum systems but also produced an intriguing scientific result. By modeling singlet fission — in which absorption of a single…
Coury Turczyn
July 28, 2023
Exascale new frontier OLCF BannerScience

Exascale’s New Frontier: WarpX

PI: Jean-Luc Vay, Accelerator Technology & Applied Physics Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory In 2016, the US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Exascale Computing Project (ECP) set out to develop advanced software for the arrival of exascale-class supercomputers capable of a quintillion (10¹⁸) or more calculations per second. That meant…
Coury Turczyn
July 18, 2023
cicada wing nanosurfaceScience

Advancing Nanoscience Through Largescale MD Simulations

Over the past decade, teams of engineers, chemists and biologists have analyzed the physical and chemical properties of cicada wings, hoping to unlock the secret of their ability to kill microbes on contact. If this function of nature can be replicated by science, it may lead to products with inherently…
Coury Turczyn
July 14, 2023
TFIIH protein complexScience

New Insights Into a Shapeshifting Protein Complex

Transcription factor IIH, or TFIIH, pronounced “TF two H,” is a veritable workhorse among the protein complexes that control human cell activity. It plays critical roles both in transcription — the highly regulated enzymatic synthesis of RNA from a DNA template — and in the repair of damaged DNA. But…
Coury Turczyn
July 7, 2023
dark matterScience

Peering into the Universe’s Dark Matter

A research team from the University of California, Santa Cruz, have used the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility’s Summit supercomputer to run one of the most complete cosmological models yet to probe the properties of dark matter — the hypothetical cosmic web of the universe that largely remains a mystery…
Coury Turczyn
July 5, 2023
core-collapse supernovaScience

Reaching a New Summit for Supernova Simulations

As a result of largescale 3D supernova simulations conducted on the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility’s Summit supercomputer by researchers from the University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, astrophysicists now have the most complete picture yet of what gravitational waves from exploding stars look like. This is critical…
Coury Turczyn
June 27, 2023
People

The NCCS’s Operational Orchestrator

At the National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS), Ashley Barker enjoys one of the least complicated–sounding job titles at the US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL): section head of operations. But within that seemingly ordinary designation lurks a multitude of demanding roles as she oversees the…
Coury Turczyn
May 24, 2023
People

The OLCF’s Matt Sieger Selected to Lead OLCF-6

by Rachel McDowell The Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility’s (OLCF’s) Matt Sieger has been named the project director for the OLCF-6 effort. This next OLCF undertaking will plan and build a world-class successor to the OLCF’s still-new exascale system, Frontier. “I am delighted to welcome Matt Sieger as the new…
Coury Turczyn
May 24, 2023
Steven Hamilton, ORNLIndustryScienceTechnology

Predicting the Future of Fission Power

As renewable sources of energy such as wind and sun power are being increasingly added to the country’s electrical grid, old-fashioned nuclear energy is also being primed for a resurgence. For the past 20 years, fission reactors have produced a nearly unchanging portion of the nation’s electricity: around 20%. But…
Coury Turczyn
May 22, 2023
KHARMA simulationScience

Simulating a More Detailed Universe with Frontier

A trio of new and improved cosmological simulation codes was unveiled in a series of presentations at the annual April Meeting of the American Physical Society in Minneapolis, MN. Chaired by the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility’s (OLCF’s) Director of Science Bronson Messer, the session covering these next-generation codes heralds…
Coury Turczyn
April 26, 2023
Technology

Plasma Simulation Code Wins 2022 ACM Gordon Bell Prize

A 16-member team of researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) won the Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM’s) 2022 Gordon Bell Prize today for its simulation code, WarpX. It is the first mesh-refined, particle-in-cell code…
Coury Turczyn
November 18, 2022
Science

Distilling How Water Turns into Ice

Among the mysteries of science that continue to elude researchers, one stands apart in its vexing simplicity: ice. Yes, frozen water. Water’s transformation from liquid to solid is actually a complex process of nature that scientists have named—nucleation—yet do not fully understand. However, Princeton University researchers have taken trailblazing steps…
Coury Turczyn
November 9, 2022
WarpXScienceTechnology

WarpX Named Gordon Bell Prize Finalist

The development of plasma-based particle accelerators—experimental technology that promises several advantages over conventional accelerators—may soon be accelerated itself by a new, advanced simulation code: WarpX. Produced primarily by a team of researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and the French Alternative Energies and Atomic…
Coury Turczyn
October 28, 2022
Bronson Messer, OLCF Director of Science, with the Frontier supercomputer, February 28, 2022.People

Pioneering Frontier: Bringing the Science

The “Pioneering Frontier” series features stories profiling the many talented Oak Ridge National Laboratory employees behind the construction and operation of the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility’s incoming exascale supercomputer, Frontier. The HPE Cray system was delivered in 2021 and is now being prepared for full user operations.. Answer: This 2003 Jeopardy!…
Coury Turczyn
October 17, 2022