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2023 Top Science Achievements at SNS & HFIR

The 2023 top science achievements from HFIR and SNS feature a broad range of materials research published in high impact journals such as Nature and Advanced Materials.

The illustration depicts ocean surface currents simulated by MPAS-Ocean. Credit: Los Alamos National Laboratory, E3SM, U.S. Dept. of Energy

A team from DOE’s Oak Ridge, Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories has developed a new solver algorithm that reduces the total run time of the Model for Prediction Across Scales-Ocean, or MPAS-Ocean, E3SM’s ocean circulation model, by 45%. 

Alex May, pictured above, is the first and only full-time data curator at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility. Credit: Carlos Jones and Wikimedia Commons, background/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy
Alex May is the first and only full-time data curator at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, evaluating datasets developed by computational scientists before they are made public through the OLCF’s Constellation portal for open data exchange.
Debjani Pal’s photo “Three-Dimensional Breast Cancer Spheroids” won the Director’s Choice Award in Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Art of Science photo competition. It will be displayed at the American Museum of Science and Energy in Oak Ridge, Tenn. Credit: Debjani Pal/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy
“Three-Dimensional Breast Cancer Spheroids” submitted by radiotherapeutics researcher Debjani Pal is stunning. Brilliant blue dots pop from an electric sphere threaded with bright colors: greens, aqua, hot pink and red.
The AI agent, incorporating a language model-based molecular generator and a graph neural network-based molecular property predictor, processes a set of user-provided molecules (green) and produces/suggests new molecules (red) with desired chemical/physical properties (i.e. excitation energy). Image credit: Pilsun You, Jason Smith/ORNL, U.S. DOE

A team of computational scientists at ORNL has generated and released datasets of unprecedented scale that provide the ultraviolet visible spectral properties of over 10 million organic molecules. 

Naval Academy midshipmen look at tiny particle fuels while touring ORNL. Credit: Lena Shoemaker/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

Nuclear engineering students from the United States Military Academy and United States Naval Academy are working with researchers at ORNL to complete design concepts for a nuclear propulsion rocket to go to space in 2027 as part of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency DRACO program.

A Univ. of Michigan-led team used Frontier, the world’s first exascale supercomputer, to simulate a system of nearly 75,000 magnesium atoms at near-quantum accuracy. Credit: SC23

 

A team of eight scientists won the Association for Computing Machinery’s 2023 Gordon Bell Prize for their study that used the world’s first exascale supercomputer to run one of the largest simulations of an alloy ever and achieve near-quantum accuracy.

Sangkeun “Matt” Lee received the Best Poster Award at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers 24th International Conference on Information Reuse and Integration.

Lee's paper at the August conference in Bellevue, Washington, combined weather and power outage data for three states – Texas, Michigan and Hawaii –  and used a machine learning model to predict how extreme weather such as thunderstorms, floods and tornadoes would affect local power grids and to estimate the risk for outages. The paper relied on data from the National Weather Service and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Environment for Analysis of Geo-Located Energy Information, or EAGLE-I, database.

Gina Tourassi. Credit: Genevieve Martin/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy 

Effective Dec. 4, Gina Tourassi will assume responsibilities as associate laboratory director for the Computing and Computational Sciences Directorate at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

ORNL researchers are establishing a digital thread of data, algorithms and workflows to produce a continuously updated model of earth systems.

Digital twins are exactly what they sound like: virtual models of physical reality that continuously update to reflect changes in the real world.