Katy Bradford: Cassette approach offers compelling construction solution
Distinguished materials scientist Takeshi Egami has spent his career revealing the complex atomic structure of metallic glass and other liquids — sometimes sharing theories with initially resistant minds in the scientific community.
The Summit supercomputer, once the world’s most powerful, is set to be decommissioned by the end of 2024 to make way for the next-generation supercomputer. Over the summer, crews began dismantling Summit’s Alpine storage system, shredding over 40,000 hard drives with the help of ShredPro Secure, a local East Tennessee business. This partnership not only reduced costs and sped up the process but also established a more efficient and secure method for decommissioning large-scale computing systems in the future.
Office of Science to announce a new research and development opportunity led by ORNL to advance technologies and drive new capabilities for future supercomputers. This industry research program worth $23 million, called New Frontiers, will initiate partnerships with multiple companies to accelerate the R&D of critical technologies with renewed emphasis on energy efficiency for the next generation of post-exascale computing in the 2029 and beyond time frame.
Nuclear physicists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory recently used Frontier, the world’s most powerful supercomputer, to calculate the magnetic properties of calcium-48’s atomic nucleus.
A study found that beaches with manmade fortifications recover more slowly from hurricanes than natural beaches, losing more sand and vegetation. The researchers used satellite images and light detection and ranging data, or LIDAR, to measure elevation changes and vegetation coverage. Changes in elevation showed how much sand was depleted during the storm and how much sand returned throughout the following year.
At ORNL, a group of scientists used neutron scattering techniques to investigate a relatively new functional material called a Weyl semimetal. These Weyl fermions move very quickly in a material and can carry electrical charge at room temperature. Scientists think that Weyl semimetals, if used in future electronics, could allow electricity to flow more efficiently and enable more energy-efficient computers and other electronic devices.
The world’s fastest supercomputer helped researchers simulate synthesizing a material harder and tougher than a diamond — or any other substance on Earth. The study used Frontier to predict the likeliest strategy to synthesize such a material, thought to exist so far only within the interiors of giant exoplanets, or planets beyond our solar system.
Two ORNL teams recently completed Cohort 18 of Energy I-Corps, an immersive two-month training program where the scientists define their technology’s value propositions, conduct stakeholder discovery interviews and develop viable market pathways.
Brittany Rodriguez never imagined she would pursue a science career at a Department of Energy national laboratory. However, after some encouraging words from her mother, input from key mentors at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, or UTRGV, and a lot of hard work, Rodriguez landed at DOE’s Manufacturing Demonstration Facility, or MDF, at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Researchers conduct largest, most accurate molecular dynamics simulations to date of two million correlated electrons using Frontier, the world’s fastest supercomputer. The simulation, which exceed an exaflop using full double precision, is 1,000 times greater in size and speed than any quantum chemistry simulation of it's kind.