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Will Wells

Science

ALCC Program Awards Nearly 6 Million Summit Node Hours across 31 Projects

Each year, researchers are awarded computing hours at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF)—a US Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science User Facility located at DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL)—through the DOE Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research’s (ASCR’s) Leadership Computing Challenge (ALCC). The ALCC program grants…
Will Wells
August 5, 2020
Science

Weighing up Plasma Particles

The sun’s energy is the result of a continuous series of nuclear fusion reactions in which ionized hydrogen in the form of plasma collides at high speeds and releases helium and energetic neutrons—producing enormous bursts of energy in the process. For years, researchers have sought a way to harness this…
Will Wells
July 28, 2020
Events

Amidst Pandemic, OLCF Hosts First Remote User Meeting

Earlier this month, the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), a US Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science User Facility located at DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), held its 16th annual user meeting, in many ways following in the tradition of previous user meetings at the OLCF. There…
Will Wells
June 24, 2020
EventsScience

Developing a Quantum Community

In April, the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), a US Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science User Facility located at DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), held its second Quantum Computing User Forum. The virtual event welcomed nearly 200 attendees from around the world and featured a series…
Will Wells
June 4, 2020
Science

A New Method for Unraveling Complex Gene Interactions

The first step for biologists who want to develop new, more efficient biofuels is to understand the genetic underpinnings of plants that can be digested by microbes into chemical compounds. One species in particular, the black cottonwood tree, or Populus trichocarpa (poplar tree), has long been a focus of scientists…
Will Wells
May 18, 2020
Events

2020 OLCF User Meeting: Remote Together

The Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), a US Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science User Facility at DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) will hold its 16th annual User Meeting June 3–4, 2020. This year, however, there will be a noticeable difference: Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the…
Will Wells
May 18, 2020
Science

Rethinking a Century of Fluid Flows

In 1922, English meteorologist Lewis Fry Richardson published Weather Prediction by Numerical Analysis. This influential work included a few pages devoted to a phenomenological model that described the way that multiple fluids (gases and liquids) flow through a porous-medium system and how the model could be used in weather prediction.…
Will Wells
March 5, 2020
People

“Bubbles” Demonstrates the Power of GPUs, Immersion Cooling

Two high school students from Knoxville’s L&N STEM Academy spent their internships at the US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) developing Bubbles—a demonstration unit used to show the potential of ORNL’s supercomputers and the future of computer cooling techniques. Logan O’Neal, a senior, and Tyler Duckworth, a…
Will Wells
March 5, 2020
Technology

Making Room for Frontier

One of the challenges of cutting-edge equipment at a cutting-edge laboratory is that when a problem arises, the answers are never straightforward. As the 2021 delivery date for Frontier -- ORNL's next supercomputer -- looms closer and closer, the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility is undergoing some major remodeling, including…
Will Wells
January 26, 2020
Eric LentzPeopleScience

The Last User of Titan

Titan, the groundbreaking Cray XK7 supercomputer operated by the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) at the US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), was officially decommissioned on August 1. The petascale machine ran countless simulations over its 7 years of service, and its sheer computational power…
Will Wells
January 2, 2020
EventsPeople

The OLCF to Mentor Interns Competing at SC19

This year, the Department of Energy (DOE)’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) will be hosting a team at the 13th Student Cluster Competition (SCC) in Denver, CO. Developed in 2007 and integrated within the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC Conference), the SCC gives undergraduate…
Will Wells
November 13, 2019
Science

2019 Gordon Bell Finalists Powered by Summit

It has been a little over a year since the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), a US Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science User Facility, officially debuted the Summit supercomputer at DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). Since then, the 200-petaflop IBM AC922 system has maintained its position…
Will Wells
October 10, 2019
Science

CAAR Partnerships for Frontier Announced

In preparation for the Frontier supercomputer, the US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) has selected eight research projects to participate in its Center for Accelerated Application Readiness (CAAR) program. Through CAAR, the OLCF will partner with application core developers, vendor partners, and OLCF staff members…
Will Wells
September 4, 2019
Four of the seven featured ADW interns (left to right): Shuto Araki, Emily Costa, Yuya Kawakami, and Sajal Dash.People

Summer Interns Gain Hands-On Experience at Massive Scale

Each year, the US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) welcomes a new group of summer interns from a wide range of backgrounds. Through opportunities offered by the lab and Oak Ridge Associated Universities, these interns are given a unique educational and professional opportunity that introduces them…
Will Wells
August 29, 2019
Science

ALCC Program Awards 6 Million Hours on OLCF Resources

Each year, researchers are awarded computing hours at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF)—a US Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science User Facility located at DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL)—through the DOE Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research’s (ASCR’s) Leadership Computing Challenge (ALCC). This year, 21 research…
Will Wells
July 31, 2019
The fungus Laccaria bicolor, in green, is shown colonizing the root of a natural host Populus trichocarpa. A better understanding of plant-fungi symbioses could lead to engineering plant-fungal associations and improve nitrogen and nutrition uptake along with plants’ resistance to drought and pathogens, according to an Oak Ridge National Laboratory-led research team. Credit: Jessy Labbe/Oak Ridge National Laboratory, U.S. Dept. of Energy and Kevin Cope/University of Wisconsin, MadisonScience

ORNL Scientists Make Fundamental Discovery to Creating Better Crops

Written by: Stephanie Seay, Oak Ridge National Laboratory A team of scientists led by the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have discovered the specific gene that controls an important symbiotic relationship between plants and soil fungi, and successfully facilitated the symbiosis in a plant that typically resists it.…
Will Wells
July 22, 2019
Will Fox of Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory examined the relationship between high-density plasma and magnetic fields. Credit: PPPLScience

PPPL’s Will Fox Honored for Research on Titan

Will Fox, a research scientist at the US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) and long-time user of the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), has received the 2019 Thomas H. Stix Award for Outstanding Early Career Contributions to Plasma Physics Research from the American Physical Society.…
Will Wells
July 22, 2019
Cray User Group 2019People

ORNL Teams Participate in CUG2019

This year’s Cray User Group meeting, an annual event that gives Cray users from around the world the opportunity to attend conferences and workshops and present papers relating to high-performance computing, was held this year in Montreal, Canada, from May 7 to 9. Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) team…
Will Wells
June 28, 2019
People

Jack Wells to Help Strengthen OpenACC User Community

On June 16, OpenACC.org announced that Jack Wells of Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) will serve as its newly elected vice president. Wells is currently the director of science for ORNL’s National Center for Computational Sciences, home of the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility. Wells will…
Will Wells
June 28, 2019