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.
Tristen Mullins enjoys the hidden side of computers. As a signals processing engineer for ORNL, she tries to uncover information hidden in components used on the nation’s power grid — information that may be susceptible to cyberattacks.
The Autonomous Systems group at ORNL is in high demand as it incorporates remote sensing into projects needing a bird’s-eye perspective.
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.