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water moleculesFeaturedScience

Getting the Matrix of Life Right

More than a year ago, computational scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory published a study in the Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation that raised a serious question about a long-standing methodology used by researchers who conduct molecular dynamics simulations involving water. What if using the standard…
Coury Turczyn
July 9, 2025
FeaturedScience

Summit Helps Veterans Affairs Connect Genetic Dots

To conduct a groundbreaking study of genetic data from more than half a million U.S. veterans, scientists needed tools of the kind found only at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory. "This particular study is probably the crown jewel of the field so far," said Ravi Madduri, a…
Matt Lakin
December 18, 2024
FeaturedScience

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 Turczyn
December 3, 2024
FeaturedScience

Protein Design on Demand

Researchers used the world’s fastest supercomputer to train an artificial intelligence model to draw up blueprints for the building blocks of life. The study earned the multi-institutional team a finalist nomination for the Association for Computing Machinery’s Gordon Bell Prize, which honors innovation in applying high-performance computing to applications in science,…
Matt Lakin
November 14, 2024
DNA researchFeaturedScience

Bigger, Faster, Smarter Genetics Research

A team of researchers used the Frontier supercomputer at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory and a new methodology for conducting a genome-wide association study, or GWAS, to earn a finalist nomination for the Association for Computing Machinery’s 2024 Gordon Bell Prize for outstanding achievement in high-performance computing,…
Coury Turczyn
November 1, 2024
Exascale new frontier OLCF BannerFeaturedScienceTechnology

Exascale’s New Frontier: ExaBiome

PI: Kathy Yelick Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory 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 meant rethinking, reinventing and optimizing dozens of scientific applications…
Matt Lakin
September 23, 2024
Exascale new frontier OLCF BannerFeaturedScience

Exascale’s New Frontier: CANDLE

PI: Rick Stevens Associate Laboratory Director, Computing, Environment and Life Sciences, Argonne 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,…
Coury Turczyn
September 4, 2024
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
cicada wing nanosurfaceScience

Advancing Nanoscience Through Largescale MD Simulations

Over the past decade, teams of engineers, chemists and biologists have analyzed the physical and chemical properties of cicada wings, hoping to unlock the secret of their ability to kill microbes on contact. If this function of nature can be replicated by science, it may lead to products with inherently…
Coury Turczyn
July 14, 2023
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