News

When the second collaborative ORNL-Vanderbilt University workshop took place on Sept. 18-19 at ORNL, about 70 researchers and students assembled to share thoughts concerning a broad spectrum of topics.

In 2023, the National School on X-ray and Neutron Scattering, or NXS, marked its 25th year during its annual program, held August 6–18 at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge and Argonne National Laboratories.   

As Frontier, the world’s first exascale supercomputer, was being assembled at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility in 2021, understanding its performance on mixed-precision calculations remained a difficult prospect.

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.  

Speakers, scientific workshops, speed networking, a student poster showcase and more energized the Annual User Meeting of the Department of Energy’s Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences, or CNMS, Aug. 7-10, near Market Square in downtown Knoxville, Tennessee.

Outside the high-performance computing, or HPC, community, exascale may seem more like fodder for science fiction than a powerful tool for scientific research. Yet, when seen through the lens of real-world applications, exascale computing goes from ethereal concept to tangible reality with exceptional benefits.

Takaaki Koyanagi, an R&D staff member in the Materials Science and Technology Division of ORNL, has received the TMS Frontiers of Materials award.

ORNL, the Department of Energy’s largest multidisciplinary laboratory, and Fairbanks Morse Defense, a portfolio company of Arcline Investment Management, have entered into a Memorandum of Understanding to collaborate on the development and integration of alternative fuel technologies aimed at reducing the marine engine’s reliance on fossil fuels. 

Dean Pierce of ORNL and a research team led by ORNL’s Alex Plotkowski were honored by DOE’s Vehicle Technologies Office for development of novel high-performance alloys that can withstand extreme environments.

Xiao-Ying Yu, a distinguished scientist at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has been named a Fellow of AVS: Science and Technology of Materials, Interfaces, and Processing, formerly American Vacuum Society.