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Reining in Runaway Electrons

At temperatures hotter than the sun, even a small disruption can interfere with a fusion reaction. Scientists planning for the operations of ITER, an international fusion plant now under assembly, needed to solve the problem of runaway electrons, negatively charged particles in the soup of matter in the plasma within…
Matt Lakin
January 7, 2025
ECP Software TechnologyFeaturedTechnology

Exascale’s New Frontier: SuperLU/STRUMPACK

PI: Sherry Li, Lawrence Berkeley 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, reinventing, and optimizing dozens of scientific applications…
Coury Turczyn
July 9, 2024
FeaturedIndustryScience

New Clues to Improving Fusion Confinement

Nuclear fusion — when two nuclei combine to form a new nucleus, thereby releasing energy — may be the clean, reliable, limitless power source of the future. But first, scientists must learn how to control its production. Building on decades of prior research, scientists have developed sophisticated techniques to improve…
Coury Turczyn
June 24, 2024
Exascale new frontier OLCF BannerScience

Exascale’s New Frontier: EXAALT

PI: Danny Perez, Los Alamos 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, reinventing and optimizing dozens of scientific applications…
Coury Turczyn
November 10, 2023
Exascale new frontier OLCF BannerScience

Exascale’s New Frontier: WDMApp

PI: Amitava Bhattacharjee Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory In 2016, the US Department of Energy’s (DOE’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 meant rethinking, reinventing, and optimizing dozens of scientific…
Coury Turczyn
August 8, 2023
Visualization of an aerosolized SARS-CoV-2 particle with various components inside and outside the particle.Science

2021 at the OLCF: Year in Review

In 2021, supercomputing at the US Department of Energy's (DOE's) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) enabled new scientific breakthroughs amid the global pandemic. From modeling small particles called quarks to simulating turbulence in fusion reactors, the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility's (OLCF's) flagship supercomputer, Summit, continued to provide unprecedented opportunities…
Rachel McDowell
December 30, 2021
Science

Closing In on Fusion

The same process that fuels stars could one day be used to generate massive amounts of power here on Earth. Nuclear fusion—in which atomic nuclei fuse to form heavier nuclei and release energy in the process—promises to be a long-term, sustainable, and safe form of energy. But scientists are still trying to fine-tune the process of…
Rachel McDowell
December 13, 2021
An image depicting a shock wave propagating through diamondScience

Team Earns Gordon Bell Prize Finalist Nomination for Simulating Carbon at Extreme Pressures and Temperatures

Are diamonds even stronger than we’ve ever imagined? Can other post-diamond phases appear when diamond is subjected to extreme pressures? A team used machine-learned descriptions of interatomic interactions on the 200-petaflop Summit supercomputer at the US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) to model more than a…
Rachel McDowell
November 17, 2021
Science

Weighing up Plasma Particles

The sun’s energy is the result of a continuous series of nuclear fusion reactions in which ionized hydrogen in the form of plasma collides at high speeds and releases helium and energetic neutrons—producing enormous bursts of energy in the process. For years, researchers have sought a way to harness this…
Will Wells
July 28, 2020
Science

Speeding Toward the Future of Fusion

In 1934, physicist Ernest Rutherford and his colleagues produced the first fusion reaction—the fusing of light nuclei to release energy—in a laboratory by converting deuterium, a heavy hydrogen isotope, to helium. Since then, scientists have built increasingly efficient fusion energy devices with a goal to achieve net fusion energy, or…
Katie Elyce Jones
January 2, 2020
Science

Science at Exascale: Molecular Dynamics for Materials

Frontier is an exascale computer planned for delivery at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility in 2021. The system will support a wide range of scientific applications for advanced modeling and simulation, as well as high-performance data analytics and artificial intelligence. In the “Science at Exascale” Q&A series, researchers working…
Rachel McDowell
May 7, 2019
Science

Science at Exascale: The Future of Fusion Modeling

Frontier is an exascale computer planned for delivery at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility in 2021. The system will support a wide range of scientific applications for advanced modeling and simulation, as well as high-performance data analytics and artificial intelligence. In the “Science at Exascale” Q&A series, researchers working…
Rachel McDowell
May 7, 2019
Science

How Hot Is Too Hot in Fusion?

Fusion, the energy that powers the stars, might one day provide abundant energy here on Earth. In a nuclear fusion reactor, the hot, charged gas known as plasma reaches out of this world temperatures at 150 million degrees Celsius, or 10 times hotter than the center of the sun. The…
Katie Elyce Jones
June 27, 2017
People

Experts Converge on ORNL for US-Japan Fusion Workshop

For nearly 40 years the United States and Japan have collaborated on making the dream of limitless clean energy a reality. In 1980 the two countries created the US-Japan Joint Institute for Fusion Theory (JIFT) to formalize this collaboration. Since that time researchers from both countries have organized workshops to…
Eric Gedenk
November 29, 2016