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Students listen as ORNL instrument scientist Hanyu Wang explains the intricacies of the LIQREF instrument at the Spallation Neutron Source

The 26th annual National School on Neutron and X-ray Scattering School concluded on August 9, 2024. Each year, more than 200 graduate students in North America studying physics, chemistry, engineering, biological matter and more compete to participate in NXS. However, given limited space, only 60 can be accepted. The school exposes graduate students to neutron and X-ray scattering techniques through lectures, experiments, and tutorials. 

Angelique Adams, front left, introduces Kusum Rathore, front center, executive director and vice president of the multi-campus office at the University of Tennessee Research Foundation, and Jim Biggs, executive director of the Knoxville Entrepreneur Center, during the final presentation event for ORNL’s Safari coaching program.

Five researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory recently completed an eight-week pilot commercialization coaching program as part of Safari, a program funded by DOE’s Office of Technology Transitions, or OTT, Practices to Accelerate the Commercialization of Technologies, or PACT. 

Image with a grey and black backdrop - in front is a diamond with two circles coming out from it, showing the insides.

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.

This is an image of a man sitting at a computer with three screens.

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.

Man in a blue polo is standing over blue water

ORNL researchers completed successful testing of a gallium nitride transistor for use in more accurate sensors operating near the core of a nuclear reactor. This is an important technical advance particularly for monitoring new, compact.

Woman is standing at podium holding a gavel in the air.

In May, the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge and Brookhaven national laboratories co-hosted the 15th annual International Particle Accelerator Conference, or IPAC, at the Music City Center in Nashville, Tennessee. 

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.

Man in a beard holding tweezers, showing a bead if space glass closer to the screen.

Researchers set a new benchmark for future experiments making materials in space rather than for space. They discovered that many kinds of glass have similar atomic structure and arrangements and can successfully be made in space. Scientists from nine institutions in government, academia and industry participated in this 5-year study. 

A team led by Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers used Frontier to explore training strategies for one of the largest artificial intelligence models to date. Credit: Getty Images

A team led by researchers at ORNL explored training strategies for one of the largest artificial intelligence models to date with help from the world’s fastest supercomputer. The findings could help guide training for a new generation of AI models for scientific research.
 

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.