Feature Articles

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.

Distinguished materials scientist Takeshi Egami has spent his career revealing the complex atomic structure of metallic glass and other liquids. He studies these materials at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. 

 

As winners of the 2024 U.S. Department of Energy’s Early Career Research Program, four scientists from Argonne National Laboratory are each receiving an award of $550,000 a year for five years to help them answer complex questions.

As high-tech companies ramp up construction of massive data centers to meet the business boom in artificial intelligence, one component is becoming an increasingly rare commodity: electricity. With decades of experience in making HPC more energy efficient, the OLCF may serve as a resource for best “bang for the buck” practices in a suddenly burgeoning industry. 

The electric grid is becoming more dynamic, including two-way connections with electric vehicles and grid storage. 

The 12^th annual Argonne Training Program on Extreme-Scale Computing (ATPESC) offers intensive two-week training for next-generation scientists, computer experts, data analysts and others aiming to infuse their computing research with new vibrancy.

Gazing out on a freshwater pond, you may see tiny green plants with oval shaped leaves floating in clusters. In overgrown ponds, these plants coat the water’s surface. These plants – called duckweed or water lentils – can grow so fast that they can double their numbers in just one to two days. But what you can’t see in that pond is the evolutionary battle between the plants and microbes trying to invade them. 

For the first time, the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory will run equipment developed at its research facilities on a commercially available quantum network at EPB Quantum Network powered by Qubitekk. Starting this month, ORNL is testing its Automatic Polarization Compensation, or APC, a key technology needed to convey quantum data across a network while maintaining all its complexities and probabilities. The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, or UTC, the first American university to host a permanent connection to a commercially available quantum network, is also participating in the effort to validate the technology's commercial viability.

After years of preparation, the first neutrinos have been observed by the Short-Baseline Near Detector collaboration. The data SBND collects will expand our knowledge of how neutrinos interact with matter and will be used to search for evidence of new physics.