Simulations Reveal the Secret to Strengthening Carbon Fiber

photo of hands with black gloves working with incredibly thin strands of carbon fiber laid out over a white sheet of paper

Simulations Reveal the Secret to Strengthening Carbon Fiber

Stronger than steel and lighter than aluminum, carbon fiber is a staple in aerospace and high-performance vehicles — and now, scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have found a way to make it even stronger. ORNL researchers simulated 5 million atoms to study a novel process…

Jeremy RumseyJune 19, 2025

Illustration of the GRETA detector, a spherical array of metal cylinders. The detector is divided into two halves to show the inside of the machine. Both halves are attached to metal harnesses, displayed against a black and green cyber-themed background.

Featured Science Technology

Novel Data Streaming Software Chases Light Speed from Accelerator to Supercomputer

Analyzing massive datasets from nuclear physics experiments can take hours or days to process, but researchers are working to radically reduce that time to mere seconds using special software being developed at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley and Oak Ridge national laboratories. DELERIA — short for Distributed Event-Level Experiment…

Jeremy RumseyMay 19, 2025

Featured Science

Quantum Computing Experiment Realizes Verifiably Random Number

Researchers used the unique capabilities of a quantum computer to generate a verifiably random number in a study published in the journal Nature. Even a workflow that included the world’s first exascale supercomputer couldn’t match the random quality of the quantum computer’s output. “All of us in today’s world use…

Matt LakinMay 5, 2025

Featured Science

INCITE 2026 Call for Proposals

The Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment, or INICITE, program has announced the 2026 Call for Proposals, inviting researchers to apply for access to some of the world’s most powerful high-performance computing systems. The proposal submission window runs from April 11 to June 16, 2025, offering an…

Angela GosnellApril 11, 2025

Different groups of proteins shown in different colors combine and attach to a broken strand of DNA.

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Summit Supercomputer Draws Molecular Blueprint for Repairing Damaged DNA

Sunburns and aging skin are obvious effects of exposure to harmful UV rays, tobacco smoke and other carcinogens. But the effects aren’t just skin deep. Inside the body, DNA is literally being torn apart. Understanding how the body heals and protects itself from DNA damage is vital for treating genetic…

Jeremy RumseyMarch 12, 2025

Labs of the Future workshop report cover and pages on a green background

Featured Technology

Scientists Lay Out Vision for AI-Based ‘Labs of the Future’

A workshop led by scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory sketched a road map toward a longtime goal: development of autonomous, or self-driving, next-generation research laboratories. Scientists have dreamed for generations of high-tech laboratories operated via robotics at the push of a button. Recent advancements in artificial intelligence…

Matt LakinFebruary 26, 2025

Events

Uniting to Build Solutions

Two ORNL-led computing teams were recognized with Department of Energy Secretary’s Honor Awards, presented by Secretary Jennifer Granholm on January 8, 2025, at the DOE Forrestal building. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm delivered the Secretary’s Honor Awards on January 8, 2025. Credit: Donica Payne, DOE “The dedicated teams we are…

Katie BetheaJanuary 17, 2025

winners of the 2024 Gordon Bell Prize are awarded on stage

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Game-Changing Quantum Chemistry Calculations on Frontier Earn Gordon Bell Prize

This year’s Association for Computing Machinery’s Gordon Bell Prize in supercomputing goes to researchers led by the University of Melbourne who used the Frontier supercomputer to conduct a quantum molecular dynamics simulation 1,000 times greater in size and speed than any previous simulation of its kind. The team also includes…

Jeremy RumseyNovember 22, 2024

Award recipients of the 2024 Gordon Bell Prize for Climate Modelling stand on stage

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Gordon Bell Climate Prize Goes to KAUST Frontier Users’ Exascale Climate Emulator

The 2024 Gordon Bell Prize for Climate Modelling has been awarded to a team of researchers led by the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, or KAUST, Saudi Arabia, who used the Frontier supercomputer to develop an exascale climate emulator with radically enhanced resolution but without the computational expense…

Jeremy RumseyNovember 22, 2024

Featured Science

Record-Breaking Run on Frontier Sets New Bar for Simulating the Universe in the Exascale Era

The universe just got a whole lot bigger — or at least in the world of computer simulations, that is. In early November, researchers at the Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory used the fastest supercomputer on the planet to run the largest astrophysical simulation of the universe ever conducted.…

Jeremy RumseyNovember 19, 2024

Featured OLCF History Science Technology

Frontier Supercomputer Hits New Highs in Third Year of Exascale

Two-and-a-half years after breaking the exascale barrier, the Frontier supercomputer at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory continues to set new standards for its computing speed and performance. The HPE Cray EX supercomputing system reported new highs for problem-solving speeds this week, updated for the TOP500 announcement at the International Conference…

Matt LakinNovember 18, 2024

Featured Science

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 LakinNovember 14, 2024

photograph of the Frontier supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory

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Gordon Bell Prize Nomination Recognizes Efforts to Train Extreme Scale Large Language Models Using Frontier

A research team led by the University of Maryland has been nominated for the Association for Computing Machinery’s Gordon Bell Prize. The team is being recognized for developing a scalable, distributed training framework called AxoNN, which leverages GPUs to rapidly train large language models, or LLMs. Winners of the Gordon…

Jeremy RumseyNovember 12, 2024

Featured Science

Frontier Users’ Exascale Climate Emulator Nominated for Gordon Bell Climate Prize

A multi-institutional team of researchers led by the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, or KAUST, Saudi Arabia, has been nominated for the Association for Computing Machinery’s 2024 Gordon Bell Prize for Climate Modelling. The team developed an exascale climate emulator with radically enhanced resolution but without the computational…

Jeremy RumseyOctober 30, 2024

Researcher Giuseppe Barca looks at a molecular dynamics simulation on a computer screen.

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Frontier Quantum Chemistry Calculations Nominated to Win HPC’s Highest Prize

Researchers led by the University of Melbourne, Australia, have been nominated for the Association for Computing Machinery’s 2024 Gordon Bell Prize in supercomputing for conducting a quantum molecular dynamics simulation 1,000 times greater in size and speed than any previous simulation of its kind. The team also includes researchers from AMD, QDX…

Jeremy RumseyOctober 17, 2024

Map of the US as seen from space, encircled by a ring of streaming data that connects a supercomputer, a scientific detector, and molecules.

Featured

Standing up the Nation’s Supercomputing Pipeline for Streaming Big Data in Real Time

Big science generates big data. But what happens when researchers produce more data than they can process? It’s actually becoming a problem for research facilities that generate so much data that only supercomputers can tackle the volume. To bridge the gap between experimental facilities and supercomputers, experts from SLAC National…

Jeremy RumseyOctober 14, 2024

Featured Science Technology

Exascale’s New Frontier: ExaAM

PI: Matt Bement Computational Sciences, Oak Ridge 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…

Matt LakinSeptember 23, 2024

Featured Science Technology

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 LakinSeptember 23, 2024

Technician places obsolete hard drives into container to be safely destroyed.

Featured OLCF History Technology

Retiring — and Shredding — the Alpine Storage System

Ever wonder what happens to massive supercomputing systems when they’re retired? Surprisingly, when it comes to the data, it’s not too different from disposing of old documents — they go straight into a shredder and sent to recycling. At the end of 2023, the Summit supercomputer — formerly the world’s…

Jeremy RumseySeptember 17, 2024

Featured Technology

OLCF Pioneers Approaches to Energy Efficient Supercomputing

As high-tech companies ramp up construction of massive data centers to meet the business boom in artificial intelligence, one component is becoming an increasingly rare commodity: electricity. Commercial demand for electricity has been growing sharply in recent years and is projected to increase by 3% in 2024 alone, according to…

Coury TurczynSeptember 10, 2024

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