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A Cleaner Vision

Anyone who’s ever lathered up knows the dilemma. The same qualities that make surfactants — the chemical compounds in soaps, shampoos and detergents that penetrate grease, dissolve stains and make those satisfying suds in the shower — so effective as cleaners can also act as irritants. When splashed in the…
Matt Lakin
January 13, 2025
FeaturedScience

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
birds eye view of earth overlayed with wavy lines arstically representing gravity wavesFeaturedScience

Decoding Atmospheric Effects of Gravity Waves

Researchers at Stanford University, the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, or ECMWF, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory used the lab’s Summit supercomputer to better understand atmospheric gravity waves, which influence significant weather patterns that are difficult to forecast. First, the team conducted ultrahigh-resolution climate simulations using the ECMWF Integrated Forecast…
Jeremy Rumsey
December 23, 2024
FeaturedScience

Summit Helps Veterans Affairs Connect Genetic Dots

To conduct a groundbreaking study of genetic data from more than half a million U.S. veterans, scientists needed tools of the kind found only at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory. "This particular study is probably the crown jewel of the field so far," said Ravi Madduri, a…
Matt Lakin
December 18, 2024
FeaturedScience

Summit’s Bonus Year of Scientific Achievement

Leadership-class supercomputers dedicated to open science are not built to last forever. In fact, they have a limited lifespan by design. No matter how powerful they may be on launch day, advancements in computing technology and changing computing needs will push them closer to obsolescence with each passing year until…
Coury Turczyn
December 3, 2024
Featured

2024 Notable System Changes: Summit and HPSS

HPSS Decommission and Kronos Availability After decades in service and having served hundreds of users that have archived over 160 petabytes, HPSS is reaching end of its life and will be decommissioned early in 2025. Please pay attention to the following key dates as you migrate workloads from the center’s…
Katie Bethea
August 22, 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
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
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

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
Science

Big Flex for Big Science

Researchers used the world’s first exascale supercomputer to run one of the largest simulations of an alloy ever and achieve near-quantum accuracy. The study led by the University of Michigan’s Vikram Gavini employed Frontier, the 1.14-exaflop HPE Cray EX supercomputer at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, to…
Matt Lakin
November 14, 2023
oxygen-28Science

Oxygen-28 Unbound

Isotopes — atoms of a particular element that have different numbers of neutrons — can be used for a variety of tasks, from tracking climate change to conducting medical research. Investigating rare isotopes, which have extreme neutron-to-proton imbalances and are often created in accelerator facilities, provides scientists with opportunities to…
Coury Turczyn
August 30, 2023
cicada wing nanosurfaceScience

Advancing Nanoscience Through Largescale MD Simulations

Over the past decade, teams of engineers, chemists and biologists have analyzed the physical and chemical properties of cicada wings, hoping to unlock the secret of their ability to kill microbes on contact. If this function of nature can be replicated by science, it may lead to products with inherently…
Coury Turczyn
July 14, 2023
TFIIH protein complexScience

New Insights Into a Shapeshifting Protein Complex

Transcription factor IIH, or TFIIH, pronounced “TF two H,” is a veritable workhorse among the protein complexes that control human cell activity. It plays critical roles both in transcription — the highly regulated enzymatic synthesis of RNA from a DNA template — and in the repair of damaged DNA. But…
Coury Turczyn
July 7, 2023
dark matterScience

Peering into the Universe’s Dark Matter

A research team from the University of California, Santa Cruz, have used the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility’s Summit supercomputer to run one of the most complete cosmological models yet to probe the properties of dark matter — the hypothetical cosmic web of the universe that largely remains a mystery…
Coury Turczyn
July 5, 2023