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Man in blue shirt and grey pants holds laptop and poses next to a green plant in a lab.

John Lagergren, a staff scientist in Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Plant Systems Biology group, is using his expertise in applied math and machine learning to develop neural networks to quickly analyze the vast amounts of data on plant traits amassed at ORNL’s Advanced Plant Phenotyping Laboratory.

Blue background with three rectangles. The first and third silver rectangles are showing the inside metal part of a fridge with small alternating horizontal rectangles going down the side in darker grey/silver.

A technology developed by Oak Ridge National Laboratory works to keep food refrigerated with phase change materials, or PCMs, while reducing carbon emissions by 30%.

ORNL researcher Louise Evans is working to ensure safeguards approaches and verification technologies are integrated early in the design process of advanced reactor technologies. Credit: Carlos Jones/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

Researchers tackling national security challenges at ORNL are upholding an 80-year legacy of leadership in all things nuclear. Today, they’re developing the next generation of technologies that will help reduce global nuclear risk and enable safe, secure, peaceful use of nuclear materials, worldwide.

Frontier supercomputer sets new standard in molecular simulation

When scientists pushed the world’s fastest supercomputer to its limits, they found those limits stretched beyond even their biggest expectations. In the latest milestone, a team of engineers and scientists used Frontier to simulate a system of nearly half a trillion atoms — the largest system ever modeled and more than 400 times the size of the closest competition.

Jiafu Mao, left, and Yaoping Wang discuss their analysis of urban and rural vegetation resilience across the United States in the EVEREST visualization lab at ORNL. Credit: Carlos Jones, ORNL/U.S. Dept. of Energy

Scientists at ORNL completed a study of how well vegetation survived extreme heat events in both urban and rural communities across the country in recent years. The analysis informs pathways for climate mitigation, including ways to reduce the effect of urban heat islands.

Quietly making noise: Measuring differential privacy could balance meaningful analytics and identity protection

To balance personal safety and research innovation, researchers at ORNL are employing a mathematical technique known as differential privacy to provide data privacy guarantees.

The transportation and industrial sectors together account for more than 50% of the country’s carbon footprint. Defossilization could help reduce new emissions from these and other difficult-to-electrify segments of the U.S. economy.

Scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and six other Department of Energy national laboratories have developed a United States-based perspective for achieving net-zero carbon emissions. 

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Simulations performed on the Summit supercomputer at ORNL are cutting through that time and expense by helping researchers digitally customize the ideal alloy. 

Architects of the Adaptable IO System, seen here with Frontier's Orion file system: Scott Klasky, left, heads the ADIOS project and leads ORNL's Workflow Systems group, and Norbert Podhorszki, an ORNL computer scientist, oversees ADIOS's continuing development. Credit: Genevieve Martin/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

Integral to the functionality of ORNL's Frontier supercomputer is its ability to store the vast amounts of data it produces onto its file system, Orion. But even more important to the computational scientists running simulations on Frontier is their capability to quickly write and read to Orion along with effectively analyzing all that data. And that’s where ADIOS comes in.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Sachin Nimbalkar, left, and Thomas Wenning guide energy-saving training activities for industry during Energy Bootcamps, hosted by DOE’s Better Plants program. Credit: ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

Helping hundreds of manufacturing industries and water-power facilities across the U.S. increase energy efficiency requires a balance of teaching and training, blended with scientific guidance and technical expertise. It’s a formula for success that ORNL researchers have been providing to DOE’s Better Plants Program for more than a decade.