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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 Lakin
November 18, 2024
Arjun Shankar ORNLFeaturedPeople

Meet the NCCS and OLCF Director: Arjun Shankar

World-leading supercomputers, like those built and deployed at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, are astonishing feats of computational and infrastructural engineering. But behind the cables, wires and racks is the hard work of hundreds of individuals committed to a mission bigger than themselves. Arjun…
Betsy Sonewald
May 14, 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
People

The NCCS’s Operational Orchestrator

At the National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS), Ashley Barker enjoys one of the least complicated–sounding job titles at the US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL): section head of operations. But within that seemingly ordinary designation lurks a multitude of demanding roles as she oversees the…
Coury Turczyn
May 24, 2023
IndustryScienceTechnology

Learning With the Flow

The bigger the swirl, the bigger the problem — and the bigger the computing power needed to solve it. Computational fluid dynamics researchers have spent decades studying how liquids and gases flow in and around such machinery as airplane wings, propeller blades and jet engines in search of faster speeds…
Matt Lakin
May 19, 2023
IndustryScienceTechnology

Putting Quantum Circuits to the Test

Researchers used Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Quantum Computing User Program, or QCUP, to perform the first independent comparison test of leading quantum computers. The study surveyed 24 quantum processors and ranked results from each against performance numbers touted by such vendors as IBM, Rigetti and Quantinuum (formerly Honeywell). The research…
Matt Lakin
May 17, 2023
INCITEScience

U.S. Department of Energy’s INCITE Program Seeks Proposals for 2024 to Advance Science and Engineering at U.S. Leadership Computing Facilities

Katie Bethea Oak Ridge National Laboratory, [email protected] Beth Cerny Argonne National Laboratory, [email protected]   The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program is now accepting proposals for high-impact, computationally intensive research campaigns in a broad array of science, engineering and computer…
Katie Bethea
April 10, 2023
OLCF HistoryScienceTechnology

Pushing the new Frontier

The numbers are in, Frontier ranks No. 1, and the researchers of Oak Ridge National Laboratory's National Center for Computational Sciences are finally breathing a few sighs of relief. Teams worked around the clock for months to help prepare the new HPE Cray EX supercomputer and gauge its record-setting exascale…
Matt Lakin
June 8, 2022
IndustryScience

Summit Fires up Predictive Breakthrough for Gas Turbines

Gas-fired turbines keep electric generators humming around the world, from power plants and factories to hospitals and universities. But the combustion process that fuels these engines comes with a billion-dollar-a-year problem: Under the wrong conditions, the resulting heat and noise can cause tremors and vibrations known as thermoacoustic oscillations, which…
Matt Lakin
March 30, 2022
ScienceTechnology

From Summit to the Stars

The Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) wrapped up its 2021 hackathon with teams from around the globe working on projects that spanned the cosmos. Ten teams with a total of 71 participants from 21 organizations took part in the October hackathon hosted by the OLCF, home to Summit, the nation’s…
Matt Lakin
March 18, 2022
ScienceTechnology

Firing Up Quantum Fidelity

Researchers used the Quantum Computing User Program (QCUP) at the US Department of Energy's (DOE's) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) to achieve major improvements in quantum fidelity, a potential step toward more accurate, reliable quantum networks and supercomputers. Quantum computing relies on transfer and storage of information via quantum bits,…
Matt Lakin
January 7, 2022
ScienceTechnology

Thinking outside the Black Box

A study led by scientists at the US Department of Energy's (DOE's) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) plumbs the depths of deep learning and could connect the digital synapses toward better, more reliable artificial-intelligence (AI) models. The research team from ORNL and the National Energy Technology Laboratory used Summit, the…
Matt Lakin
January 6, 2022
ORNL OCRPeople

ORNL’s Supercomputer Utility Squad

With more than 1,000 researchers around the world using the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility’s (OLCF’s) IBM AC922 Summit this year to pursue some of the biggest mysteries in science, the nation’s most powerful supercomputer gets little downtime. At any given hour, it’s typically running complex codes to investigate everything…
Coury Turczyn
March 31, 2021
People

Former National Center for Computational Sciences Director James Hack Retires from 40-Year Computing Career

Delivering scientific breakthroughs on the world’s most powerful supercomputers requires leaders with the experience and knowledge of how to run the high-performance computing (HPC) centers that house them. That’s precisely why James Hack was hired in 2007—to direct the National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) at the US Department of…
Rachel McDowell
January 12, 2021
OLCF HistoryTechnology

Take a Virtual Tour of ORNL’s Supercomputer Center

The National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) and Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) house some of the world’s fastest high-performance computing resources. Located at the US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), these innovative machines are in high-security facilities, not often open to the general public.…
Coury Turczyn
August 10, 2020
Events

COVID-19: OLCF Continues Normal Operations

The OLCF is operating on a normal schedule but is implementing measures to maximize social distancing. Staff who can telecommute are doing so and visitors to the laboratory are being restricted. For information on the Laboratory’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, see the public home page, www.ornl.gov. In the meantime,…
Katie Bethea
March 18, 2020
Events

Ready for 25 More Years

Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) Director Thomas Zacharia, far right, leads a keynote panel “Building the Conditions for Innovation” that reflects on the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility’s history and predicts what the future of high-performance computing may look like. Panel members include (left to right): Robert Ward (University of…
Katie Elyce Jones
November 10, 2017
People

OLCF Provides Research Opportunities, HPC Experience for Postdocs

The Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) at the US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is charged with a broad task: to develop and apply computational science capabilities that address some of the world’s most pressing concerns. To accomplish this task, the OLCF needs staff members…
Josh Cunningham
September 19, 2017