News By Location

A team of scientists with two Department of Energy Bioenergy Research Centers — the Center for Bioenergy Innovation, or CBI, at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation, or CABBI, at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign — identified a gene in a poplar tree that enhances photosynthesis and can boost tree height by about 30% in the field and by as much as 200% in the greenhouse.

ORNL's Peter Fuhr continues pushes boundaries of optical and sensor technology in applications ranging from fighting wildfires to operating the immense floodgates protecting Venice, Italy. Fuhr’s path is marked by an oddball creativity that can’t confine itself to challenges in a single field. No idea is too far out to try out. His many inventions and start-ups before joining ORNL proved his ability to bring bold ideas to life. His influence is likely to be lasting, as his imagination and infectious zeal have driven him to mentor generations of new engineers. 

A chemical reaction can convert two polluting greenhouse gases into valuable building blocks for cleaner fuels and feedstocks, but the high temperature required for the reaction also deactivates the catalyst. A team led by the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory has found a way to thwart deactivation. The strategy may apply broadly to other catalysts.

Record-Breaking Run on Frontier Sets New Bar for Simulating the Universe in the Exascale EraResearchers at Argonne National Laboratory used the Frontier supercomputer to run the largest astrophysical simulation of the universe ever conducted. The calculations set a new benchmark for cosmological hydrodynamics simulations and provide a new foundation for simulating the physics of atomic matter and dark matter simultaneously. The simulation size corresponds to surveys undertaken by large telescope observatories, a feat that until now has not been possible at this scale. 

A team of researchers led by the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, or KAUST, Saudi Arabia, are this year’s winner of the Association for Computing Machinery’s Gordon Bell Prize for Climate Modelling. The team developed an exascale climate emulator with radically enhanced resolution but without the computational expense and data storage requirements of state-of-the-art climate models.

Researchers led by the University of Melbourne, Australia, are winners of the Association for Computing Machinery’s 2024 Gordon Bell Prize in supercomputing for conducting a quantum molecular dynamics simulation 1,000 times greater in size and speed than any previous simulation of its kind. Using Frontier, the world’s most powerful supercomputer, the team calculated a system containing more than 2 million correlated electrons.

East Tennessee has become the nerve center for a resurgent nuclear industry. Discover why the region, home to Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is so attractive to this next generation of nuclear businesses.

The HPE Cray EX supercomputing system reported new highs for problem-solving speeds this week, updated for the TOP500 announcement at the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis, or SC24, in Atlanta. The score earned Frontier the No. 2 spot on the November 2024 TOP500 list, which ranks the fastest supercomputers in the world.

 

The Department of Energy's Quantum Computing User Program at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility is releasing a Request for Information to understand the latest in quantum computing hardware, software tools and user engagement.

As population growth and extreme temperatures strain the United States power grid, utilities and equipment manufacturers are looking for ways to increase the amount of electricity the grid can carry. The Powerline Conductor Accelerated Testing Facility, or PCAT, located at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is one of the only facilities in the country where companies can try out new transmission line technologies for long time periods in extremes of wind, weather, temperature and electrical load conditions.