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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
CT Challenge MBIRTechnology

ORNL/Purdue Team Wins CT Imaging Competition

A multidisciplinary team of researchers from the US Department of Energy's (DOE's) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and Purdue University won the Truth CT Reconstruction Grand Challenge, which was organized by the American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM). The team's win was announced at the 2022 AAPM Annual Meeting…
Coury Turczyn
August 16, 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
Science

Sodium Shakedown in Dopamine Research

The chemical neurotransmitter dopamine is critical to sending and receiving signals in the nervous system linked to motor movements, learning, and habit formation, which is why many therapies for drug addiction and diseases related to the aging brain, such as Parkinson’s disease, target dopamine uptake. Central to uptake is the…
Katie Elyce Jones
September 19, 2017
Science

A Real CAM-Do Attitude

Photosynthesis, the method plants use to convert energy from the sun into food, is a ubiquitous process many people learn about in elementary school. Almost all plants use photosynthesis to gather energy and stay alive. Not all photosynthetic processes are the same, though. In recent years, researchers have grown increasingly…
Eric Gedenk
April 18, 2017
Science

One Billion Processor Hours Awarded to 22 Projects through ALCC

ALCC’s mission is to provide high-performance computing resources to projects that align with DOE’s broad energy mission, with an emphasis on high-risk, high-return simulations. The US Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science has awarded nearly 1 billion processor hours to 22 projects at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility…
Maleia Wood
July 5, 2016
Science

Broadening the Bilayer

To better understand the biological processes that govern lipid raft formation—processes with broad implications for research ranging from how cells regulate proteins to how viruses invade healthy human cells—ORNL researchers are using two world-class research facilities to study the presence and formation of these nanoscale lipid patches.
Eric Gedenk
March 31, 2016