Feature Articles

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.

Distinguished materials scientist Takeshi Egami has spent his career revealing the complex atomic structure of metallic glass and other liquids. He studies these materials at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. 

 

As high-tech companies ramp up construction of massive data centers to meet the business boom in artificial intelligence, one component is becoming an increasingly rare commodity: electricity. With decades of experience in making HPC more energy efficient, the OLCF may serve as a resource for best “bang for the buck” practices in a suddenly burgeoning industry. 

For the first time, the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory will run equipment developed at its research facilities on a commercially available quantum network at EPB Quantum Network powered by Qubitekk. Starting this month, ORNL is testing its Automatic Polarization Compensation, or APC, a key technology needed to convey quantum data across a network while maintaining all its complexities and probabilities. The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, or UTC, the first American university to host a permanent connection to a commercially available quantum network, is also participating in the effort to validate the technology's commercial viability.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Western Michigan University researchers demonstrated pavement markers that use embedded microchips to transmit road shape information to self-driving cars. The technology, demonstrated to government officials in Chattanooga, TN, helps self-driving cars navigate in all weather conditions and outperformed commercial systems on roads with steep curves.

A unique manufacturing program for large metal parts holds promise to help revitalize American manufacturing and return clean energy manufacturing technologies to the United States. The approach could greatly reduce waiting times for critical components and enable economic growth in the manufacturing sector for energy, according to scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory used the Frontier supercomputer to calculate the magnetic properties of calcium-48's atomic nucleus, resolving a long-standing experimental discrepancy. Their findings provide insights into how magnetism manifests in nuclei, contributing to our understanding of nuclear forces and the processes inside supernovae. This work could influence future experimental approaches and deepen our knowledge of the universe's fundamental forces.

Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have developed a new automated drone inspection system that can respond rapidly to unusual electric grid behavior, especially in remote areas that are tough for a worker to reach. ORNL demonstrated the new approach at a training facility for powerline workers owned by utility partner EPB of Chattanooga in Tennessee. 

Five researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory recently completed an eight-week pilot commercialization coaching program as part of Safari, a program funded by DOE’s Office of Technology Transitions, or OTT, Practices to Accelerate the Commercialization of Technologies, or PACT. 

 Energy I-Corps pairs teams of researchers, often with no business background or knowledge, with industry mentors through an immersive two-month training program where the scientists define their technology’s value propositions, conduct stakeholder discovery interviews and develop viable market pathways. Two ORNL teams participated in Cohort 18, which concluded in March, helping commercialize the fruits of their research.