Katy Bradford: Cassette approach offers compelling construction solution
The Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility welcomed users to an interactive meeting at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory from Sept. 10–11 for an opportunity to share achievements from the OLCF’s user programs and highlight requirements for the future.
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.
Daryl Yang is coupling his science and engineering expertise to devise new ways to measure significant changes going on in the Arctic, a region that’s warming nearly four times faster than other parts of the planet. The remote sensing technologies and modeling tools he develops and leverages for the Next-Generation Ecosystem Experiments in the Arctic project, or NGEE Arctic, help improve models of the ecosystem to better inform decision-making as the landscape changes.
Scientists using high-resolution aerial scans and computational modeling concluded that wildfires, storms and selective logging have become key drivers behind rainforest carbon emissions, outpacing clear-cutting practices.
A team led by scientists at ORNL identified and demonstrated a method to process a plant-based material called nanocellulose that reduced energy needs by a whopping 21%, using simulations on the lab’s supercomputers and follow-on analysis.
Researchers for the first time documented the specific chemistry dynamics and structure of high-temperature liquid uranium trichloride salt, a potential nuclear fuel source for next-generation reactors.
ORNL’s Joshua New was named the 2024 Researcher of the Year by R&D World magazine as part of its R&D 100 Professional Award winners.
To speed the arrival of the next-generation solid-state batteries that will power electric vehicles and other technologies, scientists led by ORNL advanced the development of flexible, durable sheets of electrolytes. They used a polymer to create a strong yet springy thin film that binds electrolytic particles and at least doubles energy storage.
Debjani Singh, a senior scientist at ORNL, leads the HydroSource project, which enhances hydropower research by making water data more accessible and useful. With a background in water resources, data science, and earth science, Singh applies innovative tools like AI to advance research. Her career, shaped by her early exposure to science in India, focuses on bridging research with practical applications.
A study found that beaches with manmade fortifications recover more slowly from hurricanes than natural beaches, losing more sand and vegetation. The researchers used satellite images and light detection and ranging data, or LIDAR, to measure elevation changes and vegetation coverage. Changes in elevation showed how much sand was depleted during the storm and how much sand returned throughout the following year.