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Summit’s Bonus Year of Scientific Achievement

Leadership-class supercomputers dedicated to open science are not built to last forever. In fact, they have a limited lifespan by design. No matter how powerful they may be on launch day, advancements in computing technology and changing computing needs will push them closer to obsolescence with each passing year until…
Coury TurczynCoury TurczynDecember 3, 202415 min
side by side images of galaxy clusters.

Record-Breaking Run on Frontier Sets New Bar for Simulating the Universe in the Exascale Era

The universe just got a whole lot bigger — or at least in the world of computer simulations, that is. In early November, researchers at the Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory used the fastest supercomputer on the planet to run the largest astrophysical simulation of the universe ever conducted.…
Jeremy RumseyJeremy RumseyNovember 19, 20246 min
neck rupture in nuclear fission

Surprising Details in a More Precise Description of Fission

Nuclear fission — when the nucleus of an atom splits in two, releasing energy — may seem like a process that is fully understood. First discovered in 1939 and thoroughly studied ever since, fission is a constant factor in modern life, used in everything from nuclear medicine to power-generating nuclear…
Coury TurczynCoury TurczynOctober 23, 20248 min
The Frontier supercomputer simulated magnetic responses inside calcium-48, depicted by red and blue spheres. Insights into the nucleus’s fundamental forces could shed light on supernova dynamics.

Frontier Simulations Provide New Insights Into Calcium-48’s Controversial Nuclear Magnetic Excitation

The nucleus of an atom is almost inconceivably small, and most people have little idea just how much of the world around them is shaped by the strong nuclear forces that hold those tiny subatomic particles together. Nuclear physicists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory recently used…
Jeremy RumseyJeremy RumseySeptember 3, 20248 min

Frontier Simulations Could Help Build a Better Diamond

The world’s fastest supercomputer helped researchers simulate synthesizing a material harder and tougher than diamond — or any other substance on Earth. The study used Frontier, the HPE Cray EX supercomputing system at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, to predict the likeliest strategy to synthesize such a…
Matt LakinMatt LakinJuly 26, 20247 min
neutrinos

Untangling the Entangled

Researchers used quantum simulations to obtain new insights into the nature of neutrinos — the mysterious subatomic particles that abound throughout the universe — and their role in the deaths of massive stars. The study relied on support from the Quantum Computing User Program, or QCUP, and the Quantum Science Center, a national Quantum Information…
Matt LakinMatt LakinJune 21, 20247 min
X-ray bursts

Scientists Use Summit Supercomputer to Explore Exotic Stellar Phenomena

Understanding how a thermonuclear flame spreads across the surface of a neutron star — and what that spreading can tell us about the relationship between the neutron star’s mass and its radius — can also reveal a lot about the star’s composition. Neutron stars — the compact remnants of supernova…
Quinn BurkhartQuinn BurkhartMarch 15, 20246 min
Exascale new frontier OLCF Banner

Exascale’s New Frontier: LatticeQCD

PI: Andreas Kronfeld, Distinguished Scientist, Fermilab In 2016, the Department of Energy’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 leap meant rethinking, reinventing, and optimizing dozens of scientific applications and…
Coury TurczynCoury TurczynFebruary 22, 20245 min
oxygen-28

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 TurczynCoury TurczynAugust 30, 20238 min
Exascale new frontier OLCF Banner

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 TurczynCoury TurczynJuly 18, 20236 min
dark matter

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 TurczynCoury TurczynJuly 5, 202310 min

Exascale Blastoff

With the world’s first exascale supercomputer now fully open for scientific business, researchers can thank the early users who helped get the machine up to speed. Frontier set a new record for computational power when the HPE Cray EX supercomputer at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory debuted…
Matt LakinMatt LakinJune 28, 20236 min
core-collapse supernova

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 TurczynCoury TurczynJune 27, 20238 min
Steven Hamilton, ORNL

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 TurczynCoury TurczynMay 22, 20237 min
KHARMA simulation

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 TurczynCoury TurczynApril 26, 202312 min