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OLCF technology articles.

NCRC teamTechnology

DOE and NOAA Extend Strategic Partnership

The US Department of Energy (DOE) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have formally agreed to renew their strategic partnership to run and manage the National Climate-Computing Research Center (NCRC). For the past decade, the NCRC has provided a supercomputer platform for NOAA scientists to define the leading…
Coury Turczyn
January 12, 2021
Technology

Jupyter Has Landed at the OLCF

To analyze and process scientific data, researchers often employ Jupyter notebooks, interactive web documents that host snippets of code written in statistical programming languages such as Python (or R or Julia). Domain scientists, mathematicians, data scientists, and educators use the Jupyter tool suite to analyze and visualize data, iteratively prototype codes,…
Rachel McDowell
December 22, 2020
Frontier data center constructionOLCF HistoryTechnology

Building an Exascale-Class Data Center

When the US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) new exascale supercomputer, Frontier, completes installation at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in 2021, it will later debut as a landmark in high-performance computing with groundbreaking performance of greater than 1.5 exaflops (one quintillion floating-point operations per second). But right now—long before Frontier’s…
Coury Turczyn
December 14, 2020
Technology

OLCF Reaches New Heights with Andes Cluster

Staff members at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) have replaced the center’s Rhea data analysis cluster with a brand-new AMD-based system dubbed Andes. For 6 faithful years, Rhea afforded OLCF users the opportunity to perform data analysis and visualizations of simulations performed on the OLCF’s former Cray XK7…
Rachel McDowell
December 11, 2020
Data visualizationTechnology

VISTA: ORNL’s Visual Informatics for Science and Technology Advances Lab

The Computing and Computational Sciences Directorate is home to VISTA: ORNL's Visual Informatics for Science and Technology Advances (VISTA) Lab. The mission of VISTA is to improve domain experts’ ability to explore large and complex data through the development and application of interactive data visualization and analysis systems. By acting as a bridge connecting…
Katie Bethea
December 8, 2020
Technology

Data Matters: Scientific Data Management Tool Improves Labeling, Information Sharing for OLCF Researchers

This story is the fourth in a series called “Data Matters,” a collection of features dedicated to exploring the relevance of data for scientific advancement and exploration at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, across Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and beyond. The increasingly collaborative nature of scientific research has established…
Andrea Schneibel
November 19, 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

The Greenest Option: Finding New Homes for Old Machines

As head of the High-Performance Computing (HPC) Infrastructure Operations Group in the National Center for Computational Science (NCCS) at the US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Paul Abston does not like to see government investments in technology go to waste. Even more so, he is highly…
Coury Turczyn
October 28, 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
rotating detonation engineIndustryTechnology

Realizing the Dream of Rotating Detonation Engines through an OLCF, NETL, GE, and University of Michigan Collaboration

Revisiting an engine concept first proposed in the 1950s, researchers at the University of Michigan (UM) are conducting trailblazing research that may finally unlock its potential for ultra-high-efficiency propulsion and power generation. UM professor of aerospace engineering Venkat Raman has tapped the nation’s most powerful supercomputer for open science, Summit,…
Coury Turczyn
August 26, 2020
OLCF HistoryTechnology

Take a Virtual Tour of ORNL’s Supercomputer Center

The National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) and Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) house some of the world’s fastest high-performance computing resources. Located at the US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), these innovative machines are in high-security facilities, not often open to the general public.…
Coury Turczyn
August 10, 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