Creating energy the way the sun and stars do — through nuclear fusion — is one of the grand challenges facing science and technology. What’s easy for the sun and its billions of relatives turns out to be particularly difficult on Earth.
A force within the supercomputing community, Jack Dongarra developed software packages that became standard in the industry, allowing high-performance computers to become increasingly more powerful in recent decades.
The prospect of simulating a fusion plasma is a step closer to reality thanks to a new computational tool developed by scientists in fusion physics, computer science and mathematics at ORNL.