Skip to main content
Director of ORNL’s AI Initiative Prasanna Balaprakash addresses attendees at the Generative AI for ORNL Science Workshop. Credit: ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

The Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory hosted its Smoky Mountains Computational Science and Engineering Conference for the first time in person since the COVID pandemic broke in 2020. The conference, which celebrated its 20th consecutive year, took place at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in downtown Knoxville, Tenn., in late August.

Steven Hamilton, an R&D scientist in the HPC Methods for Nuclear Applications group at ORNL, leads the ExaSMR project. ExaSMR was developed to run on the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility’s exascale-class supercomputer, Frontier. Credit: Genevieve Martin/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

The Exascale Small Modular Reactor effort, or ExaSMR, is a software stack developed over seven years under the Department of Energy’s Exascale Computing Project to produce the highest-resolution simulations of nuclear reactor systems to date. Now, ExaSMR has been nominated for a 2023 Gordon Bell Prize by the Association for Computing Machinery and is one of six finalists for the annual award, which honors outstanding achievements in high-performance computing from a variety of scientific domains.  

ORNL, VA and Harvard researchers developed a sparse matrix full of anonymized information on what is thought to be the largest cohort of healthcare data used for this type of research in the U.S. The matrix can be probed with different methods, such as KESER, to gain new insights into human health. Credit: Nathan Armistead/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

A team of researchers has developed a novel, machine learning–based  technique to explore and identify relationships among medical concepts using electronic health record data across multiple healthcare providers.

Genetic analysis revealed connections between inflammatory activity and development of atomic dermatitis, according to researchers from the UPenn School of Medicine, the Perelman School of Medicine, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Credit: Kang Ko/UPenn

University of Pennsylvania researchers called on computational systems biology expertise at Oak Ridge National Laboratory to analyze large datasets of single-cell RNA sequencing from skin samples afflicted with atopic dermatitis.

An ORNL-led team studied the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein in the trimer state, shown here, to pinpoint structural transitions that could be disrupted to destabilize the protein and negate its harmful effects. Credit: Debsindhu Bhowmik/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

To explore the inner workings of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, or SARS-CoV-2, researchers from ORNL developed a novel technique.

An ORNL-led team comprising researchers from multiple DOE national laboratories is using artificial intelligence and computational screening techniques – in combination with experimental validation – to identify and design five promising drug therapy approaches to target the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Credit: Michelle Lehman/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

An ORNL-led team comprising researchers from multiple DOE national laboratories is using artificial intelligence and computational screening techniques – in combination with experimental validation – to identify and design five promising drug therapy approaches to target the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

Frontier supercomputer

A multi-institutional team, led by a group of investigators at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has been studying various SARS-CoV-2 protein targets, including the virus’s main protease. The feat has earned the team a finalist nomination for the Association of Computing Machinery, or ACM, Gordon Bell Special Prize for High Performance Computing-Based COVID-19 Research.

ORNL assisted in investigating proteins called porins, one shown in red, which are found in the protective outer membrane of certain disease-causing bacteria and tether the membrane to the cell wall. Credit: Hyea (Sunny) Hwang/Georgia Tech and ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

Scientists from Oak Ridge National Laboratory used high-performance computing to create protein models that helped reveal how the outer membrane is tethered to the cell membrane in certain bacteria.

The CrossVis application includes a parallel coordinates plot (left), a tiled image view (right) and other interactive data views. Credit: Chad Steed/Oak Ridge National Laboratory, U.S. Dept. of Energy

From materials science and earth system modeling to quantum information science and cybersecurity, experts in many fields run simulations and conduct experiments to collect the abundance of data necessary for scientific progress.

Computing – Mining for COVID-19 connections

Scientists have tapped the immense power of the Summit supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory to comb through millions of medical journal articles to identify potential vaccines, drugs and effective measures that could suppress or stop the