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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
neutrinosFeaturedScience

Untangling the Entangled

Researchers used quantum simulations to obtain new insights into the nature of neutrinos — the mysterious subatomic particles that abound throughout the universe — and their role in the deaths of massive stars. The study relied on support from the Quantum Computing User Program, or QCUP, and the Quantum Science Center, a national Quantum Information…
Matt Lakin
June 21, 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
RTXIndustryScienceTechnology

Summit Helps Forge Stronger Flights

Titanium alloys serve as cornerstone materials for the aerospace industry — stronger and lighter than steel, resistant to rust and corrosion and resilient past the melting points of most other metals. Companies such as RTX, formerly Raytheon Technologies, rely on these sturdy alloys to build such vital machinery as jet-engine turbine…
Matt Lakin
April 30, 2024
Long shot photo of the front of the HPE Cray EX Frontier supercomputer showing the logo and electrical boxes above the system.Science

ORNL collaboration helps secure 2023 Gordon Bell Prizes

In 2023, from the Science Engagement section in the National Center for Computational Sciences at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory were recognized as part of the two teams who would go on to win the Association for Computing Machinery’s Gordon Bell Prize and the Gordon Bell Prize…
Betsy Sonewald
April 15, 2024
NASA Mars simulationScience

Planning for a Smooth Landing on Mars

A U.S. mission to land astronauts on the surface of Mars will be unlike any other extraterrestrial landing ever undertaken by NASA. Although the space agency has successfully landed nine robotic missions on Mars since its first surface missions in 1976 with the Viking Project, safely bringing humans to Mars…
Coury Turczyn
February 29, 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
ScienceTechnology

OLCF Announces SummitPLUS Allocations

The Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility has informed the recipients of high-performance computing time through the SummitPLUS allocation program, which extends the operation of the Summit supercomputer through October 2024. Over 19 million hours of compute time will be distributed among 108 projects covering the gamut of…
Coury Turczyn
December 19, 2023
Science

Custom Software Speeds Up, Stabilizes High-Profile Ocean Model

On the beach, ocean waves provide soothing white noise. But in scientific laboratories, they play a key role in weather forecasting and climate research. Along with the atmosphere, the ocean is typically one of the largest and most computationally demanding components of Earth system models like the Department of Energy’s Energy Exascale…
Elizabeth Rosenthal
December 18, 2023
moleculesScienceTechnology

ORNL Scientists Generate Molecular Datasets at Extreme Scale

A team of computational scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory has generated and released datasets of unprecedented scale that provide the ultraviolet visible spectral properties of over 10 million organic molecules. Understanding how a molecule interacts with light is essential to uncovering its electronic and optical…
Coury Turczyn
December 13, 2023
Science

Frontier Search for Lightweight, Flexible Alloys Wins Gordon Bell Prize

A team of eight scientists won the Association for Computing Machinery’s 2023 Gordon Bell Prize for their study that used the world’s first exascale supercomputer to run one of the largest simulations of an alloy ever and achieve near-quantum accuracy. The ACM Gordon Bell Prize recognizes outstanding achievement in high-performance…
Matt Lakin
November 16, 2023