ORNL in the News

ORNL gets state environmental award

(Knoxville News Sentinel) "Reducing our use of natural resources is important to Oak Ridge National Laboratory," Susan Michaud, the lab's manager of pollution prevention, said in a statement. "Last year we implemented several water-reducing projects that reduced our water consumption by 15 million gallons per year."...10/30

ADIOS Ignites Combustion Simulations

(HPCwire) Despite the muscle of today's premier supercomputing systems, scaling and I/O often prevent leading software packages from taking full advantage of the latest hardware's potential power. These ancillary tasks take precious time and resources away from studying the fundamental science that impacts our everyday lives. To address these issues, a team of researchers from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Georgia Tech, and Rutgers University developed the ADaptable I/O file System, or ADIOS....10/30

IG takes a look at DOE's work for DOD

(Atomic City Underground) According to information provided by the IG, "the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2009, required the Inspector General of the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy to review procurement methods to determine whether the Department complied with DoD procurement requirements and/or whether alternative procurement policies were in place....10/30

2 I-40 lanes could open in 4 months

(Asheville Citizen-Times) The N.C. Department of Transportation said Thursday that getting two lanes open using the eastbound side of the highway would take four months. The entire cleanup of the 500,000 tons of rocks in the 150-foot-tall slide could take five months, said Joel Setzer, chief engineer for the region....10/29

energy & science policy

Augustine Committee Releases Final Report

(AIP Bulletin) The full report provided additional evidence for what has long been known: there is a fundamental, and persistent, disparity between NASA’s current and future programs and its annual appropriations....10/29

Economists aim to reduce businesses' gas emissions

(Knoxville News Sentinel) With legislation and regulatory rules in the works to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, economists are weighing in on how to get businesses to alter their smokestack behavior....10/30

science & technology

Hubble Captures Sparkling ‘Jewel Box’ Star Cluster

(Wired) Using seven different filters, Hubble captured the Jewel Box cluster in far ultraviolet to near-infrared light. The different colors of the stars — from pale blue to bright ruby red — result from their differing intensities at various ultraviolet wavelengths....10/30

China Joins Petaflop Club

(HPCwire) China has apparently become the third country to build a petaflop supercomputer. Xinhua news agency reported on Thursday that the country has unveiled "Tianhe," a 1.206 peak petaflop machine powered by a combination of 6,144 Intel CPUs and 5,120 AMD GPUs....10/30

‘Impossible’ Device Could Propel Flying Cars, Stealth Missiles

(Wired) The Emdrive is an electromagnetic drive that would generate thrust from a closed system — “impossible” say some experts....10/29

Russians to ride a nuclear-powered spacecraft to Mars

(Christian Science Monitor) President Dmitry Medvedev says Russia will spend $600 million on a nuclear-powered spacecraft to take men to Mars, and beyond. Is it safe?...10/29

Foundation grant funds research project

(UT Daily Beacon) The UT College of Communication and Information recently received a grant from the National Science Foundation for $3.2 million to fund a five-year project. The DataONE project (the “ONE” stands for Observation Network for Earth) has the potential to drastically improve the way that scientists log and search for data from different research projects worldwide....10/30