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Astrophysics

neutron star simulation ORNLFeaturedScience

Journey to the Center of a Neutron Star

For astrophysicists, neutron stars stand out as objects of irresistible fascination — perhaps, in part, because of how difficult they are to decipher. But calculations conducted on the Frontier supercomputer, located at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, have revealed new clues about the inner workings of neutron…
Coury Turczyn
June 2, 2025
neutrinosFeaturedScience

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 Lakin
June 21, 2024
dark matterScience

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 Turczyn
July 5, 2023
IndustryScienceTechnology

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 Lakin
June 28, 2023
IndustryPeopleScienceTechnology

OLCF researchers win R&D 100 award

A team that includes researchers from the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility recently received an R&D 100 Award for their work on Flash-X, a multiphysics simulation software package with applications that include modeling the collapse and explosion of a massive star core, better known as a supernova. Flash-X was developed…
Matt Lakin
September 8, 2022
Frontier data center imageScience

Forging Ahead with Frontier: Ready to Crush Science

Computational users at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) are running scientific codes on Frontier’s architecture in the form of a powerful test system at the OLCF called Crusher. Frontier, an HPE Cray EX supercomputer capable of 1018 calculations per second—or 10 with 18 zeroes—was installed in late 2021 and is…
Rachel McDowell
March 28, 2022
ScienceTechnology

From Summit to the Stars

The Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) wrapped up its 2021 hackathon with teams from around the globe working on projects that spanned the cosmos. Ten teams with a total of 71 participants from 21 organizations took part in the October hackathon hosted by the OLCF, home to Summit, the nation’s…
Matt Lakin
March 18, 2022
Science

Unraveling the “Big Boom”

Simulations performed on Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Summit supercomputer provide a more detailed look at how stars die and could help unlock new insights into the origins of Earth’s heavy elements. The study, conducted by scientists at ORNL and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, modeled the collapse and explosion of…
Matt Lakin
November 11, 2021
Science

DOE and NCSA Supercomputing Speed Studies into Black Hole Origins

Five years ago this month, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory, or LIGO, made its first detection of gravitational waves, marking a historic event in the astrophysics community. Since then, LIGO has reported more than 50 gravitational wave observations. Often generated by collisions of compact astrophysical objects—such as black holes or…
Katie Bethea
September 23, 2020
Bronson Messer OLCFPeople

OLCF Names New Director of Science

Bronson Messer—a computational astrophysicist, Distinguished Scientist in the Scientific Computing and Theoretical Physics groups at the US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), and a former Jeopardy! champion—has been named the new director of science for the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF). As director of science,…
Coury Turczyn
June 4, 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
Eric LentzPeopleScience

The Last User of Titan

Titan, the groundbreaking Cray XK7 supercomputer operated by the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) at the US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), was officially decommissioned on August 1. The petascale machine ran countless simulations over its 7 years of service, and its sheer computational power…
Will Wells
January 2, 2020
Science

Galactic Winds Demystified

Using the Titan supercomputer at the US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a team of astrophysicists created a set of galactic wind simulations of the highest resolution ever performed. The simulations will allow researchers to gather and interpret more accurate, detailed data that explains how galactic winds affect…
Elizabeth Rosenthal
August 1, 2019
Will Fox of Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory examined the relationship between high-density plasma and magnetic fields. Credit: PPPLScience

PPPL’s Will Fox Honored for Research on Titan

Will Fox, a research scientist at the US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) and long-time user of the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), has received the 2019 Thomas H. Stix Award for Outstanding Early Career Contributions to Plasma Physics Research from the American Physical Society.…
Will Wells
July 22, 2019
People

OLCF Scientist Talks Early Summit Results at APS Meeting

The American Physical Society's "Quarks to the Cosmos" meeting took place April 13–16 in Denver. Bronson Messer, a computational scientist at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), gave an invited talk at the American Physical Society’s (APS’s) “Quarks to the Cosmos” April meeting in Denver, detailing his current work…
Rachel McDowell
April 25, 2019
OLCF History

OLCF 25: Illuminating Dark Matter

In 2017, the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility celebrated 25 years of leadership in high-performance computing. This article is part of a series summarizing a dozen significant contributions to science enabled by OLCF resources. The full report is available here. In 2007, researchers shone a galactic-sized light on the dark matter…
OLCF Staff Writer
December 6, 2017