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OLCF technology articles.

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
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
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
OLCF metrics data flowTechnology

OLCF Supercharges Supercomputer Analytics with Apache Kafka

The high-performance computing (HPC) systems at the US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) are about to vault into the “pubsub” era of real-time streaming analytics. Employing the open-source Apache Kafka event-streaming platform, ORNL’s HPC Core Operations (Ops) Group has built a whole new publish/subscribe system for…
Coury Turczyn
December 16, 2019
PeopleTechnology

OLCF and Tech Company Providentia Worldwide Build Intelligence System for Supercomputer Cooling Plant

The Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) and technology consulting company Providentia Worldwide LLC recently collaborated to develop an intelligence system that combines real-time updates from the IBM AC922 Summit supercomputer with local weather and operational data from its adjacent cooling plant, with the goal of optimizing Summit’s energy efficiency.…
Katie Elyce Jones
July 31, 2019
Titan supercomputer OLCFTechnology

Farewell, Titan

The Cray XK7 Titan supercomputer operated by the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) at the US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) will be decommissioned on August 1 and disassembled for recycling. Performing up to 27 quadrillion calculations per second, Titan ranked as one of the…
Katie Elyce Jones
June 28, 2019
Technology

TechInt Develops New Solutions for Storage on Summit

The computational users running scientific codes on the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility’s (OLCF’s) 200-petaflop IBM AC922 Summit supercomputer are generating more data than ever. To handle this data explosion, each Summit compute node is equipped with a solid-state storage device (SSD) that provides a fourfold speedup in the write…
Rachel McDowell
June 12, 2019
Technology

ORNL Adds Powerful AI Appliances to Computing Portfolio

(From left to right) Cole Freniere and Michael Reynolds of Microway, Alex Volkov of NVIDIA, and Chris Layton and Brian Zachary of ORNL pose with a newly arrived DGX-2. The NVIDIA appliances connect ORNL researchers with a platform that excels at machine learning, a type of artificial intelligence that could…
Jonathan Hines
February 6, 2019
Technology

Network Enhancement Strengthens Ties Between OLCF, ESnet

ESnet provides services to more than 40 DOE research sites, including the entire national laboratory system, its major scientific instruments, and its supercomputing facilities such as the OLCF. The network permits DOE-funded scientists to productively collaborate with partners around the world. If data is the lifeblood of a scientific computing…
Jonathan Hines
January 17, 2019