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News & Science Highlights

NASA Mars simulationScience

Planning for a Smooth Landing on Mars

A U.S. mission to land astronauts on the surface of Mars will be unlike any other extraterrestrial landing ever undertaken by NASA. Although the space agency has successfully landed nine robotic missions on Mars since its first surface missions in 1976 with the Viking Project, safely bringing humans to Mars…
Coury Turczyn
February 29, 2024
Exascale new frontier OLCF BannerTechnology

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 Turczyn
February 22, 2024
ECP Software TechnologyTechnology

Exascale’s New Frontier: SLATE

PI: Mark Gates, Research Assistant Professor, Innovative Computing Laboratory at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville In 2016, the Department of Energy’s Exascale Computing Project, or 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…
Coury Turczyn
January 30, 2024
Exascale new frontier OLCF BannerScienceTechnology

Exascale’s New Frontier: E3SM-MMF

PI: Mark Taylor, Sandia National Laboratories 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 meant rethinking, reinventing, and optimizing dozens of scientific applications and software…
Matt Lakin
January 19, 2024
Science

Fungal ‘Bouncers’ Patrol Plant-Microbe Relationship

By Stephanie Seay, ORNL A new computational framework created by Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers is accelerating their understanding of who's in, who's out, who’s hot and who's not in the soil microbiome, where fungi often act as bodyguards for plants, keeping friends close and foes at bay. The research…
OLCF Staff Writer
January 17, 2024
Exascale new frontier OLCF BannerIndustryScienceTechnology

Exascale’s New Frontier: Combustion-Pele

PI: Jacqueline Chen, Sandia National Laboratories 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 meant rethinking, reinventing, and optimizing dozens of scientific applications and software…
Matt Lakin
January 5, 2024
Exascale new frontier OLCF BannerScience

Exascale’s New Frontier: ExaSGD

PI: Christopher S. Oehmen, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory 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…
Coury Turczyn
January 5, 2024
OLCF HistoryTechnology

Watch: ‘The Journey to Frontier’ Mini-Doc

The job of designing and building the world's first supercomputer capable of exascale speed — running at least a quintillion calculations per second — was no simple task. It took over 10 years of planning and advances in chip technology to culminate in the construction of the Frontier supercomputer at…
Matt Lakin
January 4, 2024
ScienceTechnology

OLCF Announces SummitPLUS Allocations

The Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility has informed the recipients of high-performance computing time through the SummitPLUS allocation program, which extends the operation of the Summit supercomputer through October 2024. Over 19 million hours of compute time will be distributed among 108 projects covering the gamut of…
Coury Turczyn
December 19, 2023
Science

Custom Software Speeds Up, Stabilizes High-Profile Ocean Model

On the beach, ocean waves provide soothing white noise. But in scientific laboratories, they play a key role in weather forecasting and climate research. Along with the atmosphere, the ocean is typically one of the largest and most computationally demanding components of Earth system models like the Department of Energy’s Energy Exascale…
Elizabeth Rosenthal
December 18, 2023
ECP Software TechnologyTechnology

Exascale’s New Frontier: Kokkos

Co-PI: Christian Robert Trott, Sandia National Laboratories Co-PI: Damien Lebrun-Grandie, Oak Ridge National Laboratory  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…
Coury Turczyn
December 14, 2023
Alex May ORNLPeople

Data Curation for the Exascale Era

This summer, Alex May faced a task daunting enough for any human: sift through a dataset of 10 million organic molecules, make sure everything was correct and get it done within two weeks. That task was not the first time May has had to assess voluminous amounts of data within a…
Coury Turczyn
December 13, 2023
moleculesScienceTechnology

ORNL Scientists Generate Molecular Datasets at Extreme Scale

A team of computational scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory has generated and released datasets of unprecedented scale that provide the ultraviolet visible spectral properties of over 10 million organic molecules. Understanding how a molecule interacts with light is essential to uncovering its electronic and optical…
Coury Turczyn
December 13, 2023
ECP Software TechnologyTechnology

Exascale’s New Frontier: SOLLVE

PI: Sunita Chandrasekaran, Brookhaven National Laboratory, University of Delaware 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…
Coury Turczyn
November 27, 2023
Science

Frontier Search for Lightweight, Flexible Alloys Wins Gordon Bell Prize

A team of eight scientists won the Association for Computing Machinery’s 2023 Gordon Bell Prize for their study that used the world’s first exascale supercomputer to run one of the largest simulations of an alloy ever and achieve near-quantum accuracy. The ACM Gordon Bell Prize recognizes outstanding achievement in high-performance…
Matt Lakin
November 16, 2023
Science

Pulling Clouds into Focus

The world’s first exascale supercomputer will help scientists peer into the future of global climate change and open a window into weather patterns that could affect the world a generation from now. The research team used Frontier, the 1.14-exaflop HPE Cray EX supercomputer at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge…
Matt Lakin
November 14, 2023
Science

Big Flex for Big Science

Researchers used the world’s first exascale supercomputer to run one of the largest simulations of an alloy ever and achieve near-quantum accuracy. The study led by the University of Michigan’s Vikram Gavini employed Frontier, the 1.14-exaflop HPE Cray EX supercomputer at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, to…
Matt Lakin
November 14, 2023