Autonomous and Complex Systems

Mission Statement:

"We accelerate scientific discovery and provide cross-disciplinary solutions for a broad customer base with recognized expertise in the fields of advanced computing, networking, automation, signal processing, sensing, and modeling and simulation."

Summary:

At Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the Autonomous and Complex Systems research group is focused on advancing workflows to accelerate scientific discoveries and provide end-to-end computing, sensing and data analysis solutions. Researchers in the group have a track record of generating novel solutions to meet challenges of a broad customer base. This includes developing foundational approaches to address outstanding research challenges as well as translating these approaches to implementations responsive to specific customer needs.

Research includes the application of advanced computing to the development of emerging classical and quantum network architectures. Research occurs not only at the network-level but also application of the concepts towards the integration of autonomous laboratories spread across multiple laboratory complexes. These efforts have resulted in the ability to streamline advanced experiments with niche instrumentation and make efficient use of high-performance computing resources. The group additionally has made significant advances in virtual infrastructure twins to permit software development and testing of compute-instrument ecosystems without needing to use resources that are either sparsely available or are in the design or construction phase.

The group also specializes in research that combines applied mathematics and high-performance computing to accelerate high-fidelity modeling and simulation for various engineering applications. This includes the development of high-accuracy numerical methods matched to challenging computational simulation problems and implementation of these methods at scale with high-performance computing resources.

Additional expertise in the group focuses on accelerating data processing workflows for edge-processing of high-bandwidth data collection systems. This includes optimizing memory of advanced processors for specific mathematical operations needed for particular signal processing routines. Algorithm development for efficient processing of datasets is another dimension of research in the group. The focus is on quantifying the tradeoffs of algorithms for specific data processing needs against computational complexity constraints. The group also specializes in constructing solutions that roll up the optimization and algorithm research with hardware and throughput limitations of compute environments at various scales.