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News Releases

ORNL's Communications team works with news media seeking information about the laboratory. Media may use the resources listed below or send questions to news@ornl.gov.
Exascale Computing Project

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Lori Diachin will take over as director of the Department of Energy’s Exascale Computing Project on June 1, guiding the successful, multi-institutional high-performance computing effort through its final stages.

Lab director Jeff Smith (left) congratulates Nia Maheshwari (center), daughter of Ketan (right) and Archana Maheshwari, on being named the recipient of the 2023 UT-Battelle Scholarship. Ketan Maheshwari is an engineer in the lab's Computing and Computational Sciences Directorate.

Nia Maheshwari, a recent graduate of Farragut High School, has been named recipient of the 2023 UT-Battelle Scholarship to attend the University of Tennessee.

Matt Sieger. Credit: Carlos Jones/ORNL

The Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility’s Matt Sieger has been named the project director for the OLCF-6 effort. This next OLCF undertaking will plan and build a world-class successor to the OLCF’s still-new exascale system, Frontier.

Juan M. Restrepo

Juan M. Restrepo, a distinguished researcher and head of the Mathematics in Computation section at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has been named vice-chair of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics' new Activity Group on Equity, Diversity and Inclusion. SIAM is one of the world’s premier societies for mathematics and computational sciences.

ORNL’s Shih-Chieh Kao has been named a 2023 fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers’ Environmental & Water Resources Institute. Credit: Carlos Jones/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

Shih-Chieh Kao, manager of the Water Power program at ORNL, has been named a fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineer’s Environmental & Water Resources Institute, or EWRI.

ORNL researchers Michael Smith, Steven Pain and Kelly Chipps use JENSA, a unique gas jet system, for laboratory studies of nuclear reactions that also occur in neutron stars in binary systems. Credit: Steven Pain/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

Led by Kelly Chipps of ORNL, scientists working in the lab have produced a signature nuclear reaction that occurs on the surface of a neutron star gobbling mass from a companion star. Their achievement improves understanding of stellar processes generating diverse nuclear isotopes.

The Frontier supercomputer at ORNL remains in the number one spot on the May 2023 TOP500 rankings, with an updated high-performance Linpack score of 1.194 exaflops. Engineers at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, which houses Frontier and its predecessor Summit, expect that Frontier’s speeds could ultimately top 1.4 exaflops, or 1.4 quintillion calculations per second. Credit: Carlos Jones/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

With the world’s first exascale supercomputing system now open to full user operations, research teams are harnessing Frontier’s power and speed to tackle some of the most challenging problems in modern science.

Colleen Iversen is the new director of NGEE Arctic, leading a large cross-disciplinary team of scientists in pursuit of a better understanding of Arctic climate processes. Credit: ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

Colleen Iversen, ecosystem ecologist, group leader and distinguished staff scientist, has been named director of the Next-Generation Ecosystem Experiments Arctic, or NGEE Arctic, a multi-institutional project studying permafrost thaw and other climate-related processes in Alaska.

Kelly Chipps of Oak Ridge National Laboratory has been appointed to the Nuclear Sciences Advisory Committee, which advises the Department of Energy and National Science Foundation. Credit: Carlos Jones/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

Kelly Chipps, a nuclear astrophysicist at ORNL, has been appointed to the Nuclear Science Advisory Committee, or NSAC. The committee provides official advice to DOE and the National Science Foundation, or NSF, about issues relating to the national program for basic nuclear science research.

ytterbium

ORNL’s electromagnetic isotope separator, or EMIS, made history in 2018 when it produced 500 milligrams of the rare isotope ruthenium-96, unavailable anywhere else in the world.