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water moleculesScience

Something in the Water Does Not Compute

Computational scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have published a study in the Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation that questions a long-accepted factor in simulating the molecular dynamics of water: the 2 femtosecond (one quadrillionth of a second) time step. The femtosecond is a timescale…
Coury Turczyn
May 6, 2024
SLAC LINACTechnology

ORNL and SLAC Team Up for Breakthrough Biology Projects

Plans to unite the capabilities of two cutting-edge technological facilities funded by the Department of Energy’s Office of Science promise to usher in a new era of dynamic structural biology. Through DOE’s Integrated Research Infrastructure, or IRI, initiative, the facilities will complement each other’s technologies in the pursuit of science…
Coury Turczyn
May 6, 2024
Science

New Data Processing Automation Grows Plant Science at ORNL

At the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, scientists studying plant characteristics have access to sophisticated robotic imaging tools and sensors at the Advanced Plant Phenotyping Laboratory, or APPL. This greenhouse-like lab offers one of the most diverse suites of imaging capabilities for plant phenotyping worldwide, letting scientists quickly…
Betsy Sonewald
April 15, 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
TFIIH protein complexScience

New Insights Into a Shapeshifting Protein Complex

Transcription factor IIH, or TFIIH, pronounced “TF two H,” is a veritable workhorse among the protein complexes that control human cell activity. It plays critical roles both in transcription — the highly regulated enzymatic synthesis of RNA from a DNA template — and in the repair of damaged DNA. But…
Coury Turczyn
July 7, 2023
Science

Autocoding Cancer

An algorithm developed by the US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in partnership with the National Cancer Institute (NCI) is speeding up classification, or coding, of cancer pathology reports. The early results from the Cancer Moonshot program show that the algorithm dramatically reduces the time it…
Betsy Sonewald
February 10, 2023
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
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
Science

Two Finalists Nominated for Gordon Bell Special Prize for COVID-19 Work on Summit

Every year at the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC), one deserving team is awarded the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Gordon Bell Prize to recognize an outstanding achievement in high-performance computing (HPC). Winners are chosen based on the demonstrated innovativeness of their algorithm development…
Rachel McDowell
November 18, 2020
Science

Summit Charts a Course to Uncover the Origins of Genetic Diseases

https://vimeo.com/336592112 A visualization of a new structure of the human PIC. The spheres correspond to the positions of patient-derived mutations color-coded by disease phenotype. Video credit: Ivaylo Ivanov, Georgia State University. Environmental conditions, lifestyle choices, chemical exposure, and foodborne and airborne pathogens are among the external factors that can cause…
Elizabeth Rosenthal
May 20, 2019
Technology

Genomics Code Exceeds Exaops on Summit Supercomputer

Researchers at the US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory broke the exascale barrier, achieving a peak throughput of 1.88 exaops—faster than any previously reported science application—while analyzing genomic data on the recently launched Summit supercomputer. The ORNL team achieved the feat, the equivalent to carrying out nearly 2…
Jonathan Hines
June 8, 2018
Science

A Novel Method for Comparing Plant Genes

A map of gene expression correlation triangles, with positive correlations (blue edges) between Kalanchoë genes (dark green nodes) and pineapple genes (yellow nodes) and negative correlations (red edges) between Kalanchoë or pineapple genes and Arabidopsis genes (light green nodes). During normal photosynthesis, plants capture sunlight and carry out respiration during…
Rachel McDowell
February 27, 2018