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News & Science Highlights

A group of students and an ORNL staff member stand in front of the Frontier supercomputer at ORNL.Science

Supercomputers Lead to Super Learning Experiences

The Pathways to Computing Internship Program is accepting applications for 2023. For information on the program or to apply, visit https://education.ornl.gov/pathways/. Summer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is usually a bustling, busy time as hundreds of students arrive to begin an internship program, working alongside engineers, scientists, and researchers to…
Betsy Sonewald
December 6, 2022
Science

The Climate in a Container

Successfully running a simulation program on a supercomputer requires more than just writing code. An application such as a climate model requires libraries, network support, and the correct operating environment. Because of these complex and multilayered requirements, applications are typically customized and built natively on a computing system, making them…
Betsy Sonewald
December 5, 2022
PeopleTechnology

Data Transfer Tool Makes New Connections at ORNL

Data is the fuel that propels scientific research, and fortunately for scientists, there is no shortage of data in the modern world—a single scientific instrument can produce terabytes of data. However, just as important as collecting the data is being able to access it and analyze it. For researchers at…
Betsy Sonewald
December 2, 2022
Six people from ORNL and the VA stand in front of the Summit supercomputer.Technology

Secure Science with CITADEL

A team from Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) used the CITADEL security framework to securely transfer and analyze veterans’ health records on ORNL’s Summit, an IBM AC922 supercomputer housed at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, a US Department of Energy (DOE)…
Betsy Sonewald
December 1, 2022
ScienceTechnology

Exascale Acceleration

Just how fast can the world’s fastest supercomputer go? Maybe even faster than imagined. Researchers studying plasma physics for particle accelerators recently used the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility’s Frontier supercomputer to achieve a speedup by as much as eightfold in their code’s performance – more than double the improvement…
Matt Lakin
November 18, 2022
Technology

Plasma Simulation Code Wins 2022 ACM Gordon Bell Prize

A 16-member team of researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) won the Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM’s) 2022 Gordon Bell Prize today for its simulation code, WarpX. It is the first mesh-refined, particle-in-cell code…
Coury Turczyn
November 18, 2022
OLCF HistoryScienceTechnology

Charting the New Frontier

The Frontier supercomputer at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory logged a new benchmark this week that further illustrates its world-changing potential and held onto its top ranking as the world’s fastest on the 60th TOP500 list. Frontier set a new speed record for the mixed-precision calculations often used by artificial…
Matt Lakin
November 16, 2022
Science

INCITE program awards supercomputing time to 56 projects to accelerate science and engineering research

MEDIA CONTACTS: Julie Parente Argonne National Laboratory, [email protected] Katie Bethea Oak Ridge National Laboratory, [email protected] The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Science announced allocations of supercomputer access to 56 high-impact computational science projects for 2023 through its Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program.…
Katie Bethea
November 14, 2022
Science

Distilling How Water Turns into Ice

Among the mysteries of science that continue to elude researchers, one stands apart in its vexing simplicity: ice. Yes, frozen water. Water’s transformation from liquid to solid is actually a complex process of nature that scientists have named—nucleation—yet do not fully understand. However, Princeton University researchers have taken trailblazing steps…
Coury Turczyn
November 9, 2022
Three men stand in front of the Frontier supercomputer with the Frontier logo in the backgroundTechnology

LLNL, ORNL Unite for UnifyFS

A multi-institution team is celebrating the latest software release that supports the use of distributed node-local storage devices for high-performance computing (HPC) applications. The software is an important piece of the hierarchical storage system required on modern, large-scale HPC systems and offers a unified shared namespace over distributed storage resources…
Betsy Sonewald
November 1, 2022
ScienceTechnology

Solving the Protein Puzzle

A simple scoop of soil or water can hold an entire ecosystem–potentially millions or more microscopic organisms and the countless proteins they rely on to survive. Computations performed at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory could help count, sort and catalog each of those proteins in record…
Matt Lakin
October 28, 2022
WarpXScienceTechnology

WarpX Named Gordon Bell Prize Finalist

The development of plasma-based particle accelerators—experimental technology that promises several advantages over conventional accelerators—may soon be accelerated itself by a new, advanced simulation code: WarpX. Produced primarily by a team of researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and the French Alternative Energies and Atomic…
Coury Turczyn
October 28, 2022
ScienceTechnology

Fast-Tracking Medical Discovery

The world’s fastest supercomputer could help discover the next great cure hiding in plain sight. Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory used Frontier, the world’s first exascale computer, to scan hundreds of thousands of biomedical concepts from millions of scientific publications in search of potential…
Matt Lakin
October 25, 2022
Happy Exascale Day GraphicScience

Exascale Day 2022

On October 18, the US Department of Energy's (DOE's) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is celebrating the fourth National Exascale Day. The holiday was created in 2019 as an initiative of DOE's Exascale Computing Project (ECP) and Cray, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company, to honor scientists and researchers who will…
Betsy Sonewald
October 17, 2022
Bronson Messer, OLCF Director of Science, with the Frontier supercomputer, February 28, 2022.People

Pioneering Frontier: Bringing the Science

The “Pioneering Frontier” series features stories profiling the many talented Oak Ridge National Laboratory employees behind the construction and operation of the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility’s incoming exascale supercomputer, Frontier. The HPE Cray system was delivered in 2021 and is now being prepared for full user operations.. Answer: This 2003 Jeopardy!…
Coury Turczyn
October 17, 2022
Science

2022 OLCF User Group Executive Board Election

Six candidates are running for three open positions on the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility’s (OLCF’s) User Group (OUG) Executive Board. The OUG Executive Board represents the needs of users and provides feedback on services and resources to OLCF leadership. OLCF users are asked to vote for their top three…
William Renaud
October 17, 2022
Abstract imageScienceTechnology

Spinning up Quantum Fidelity

Researchers reached new levels of accuracy in quantum simulations of spin defects using the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility’s Quantum Computing User Program, or QCUP, at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Their work offers a potential step toward greater precision and reliability in computations on quantum…
Matt Lakin
October 3, 2022