Oak Ridge Today

Titan supercomputer at ORNL completes acceptance testing

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Titan Supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory

The Titan supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory was ranked as the world’s fastest supercomputer in November 2012. (Photo courtesy of ORNL)

By Leo Williams

Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Titan supercomputer has completed rigorous acceptance testing to ensure the functionality, performance, and stability of the machine, one of the world’s most powerful supercomputing systems for open science.

The U.S. Department of Energy machine, the first to combine different types of processing units to maximize performance at such a large scale, ranked as the fastest supercomputer in the world in the November 2012 list published at http://www.top500.org/. Titan, a Cray XK7 supercomputer, is capable of more than 27,000 trillion calculations each second—or 27 petaflops. [Read more…]

FORNL monthly luncheon lecture Tuesday

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Liyuan Liang

Liyuan Liang

The Friends of ORNL will hold its monthly luncheon lecture meeting on Tuesday, June 11.

This month, Liyuan Liang and members of her team will discuss “ORNL Mercury Research Program and the Story of Methylation Gene Discovery.” This meeting is open to the public.

Liang, who heads the U.S. Department of Energy-funded mercury research program at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, earned a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from Northeastern University at Boston, and a master’s and doctorate from California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in environmental engineering sciences. [Read more…]

New all-solid sulfur-based battery outperforms lithium-ion technology

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ORNL Lithium-Sulfur Battery

A new all-solid lithium-sulfur battery developed by an Oak Ridge National Laboratory team led by Chengdu Liang has the potential to reduce cost, increase performance, and improve safety compared with existing designs. (Submitted photo)

Scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory have designed and tested an all-solid lithium-sulfur battery with approximately four times the energy density of conventional lithium-ion technologies that power today’s electronics.

The ORNL battery design, which uses abundant low-cost elemental sulfur, also addresses flammability concerns experienced by other chemistries.

“Our approach is a complete change from the current battery concept of two electrodes joined by a liquid electrolyte, which has been used over the last 150 to 200 years,” said Chengdu Liang, lead author on the ORNL study published this week in Angewandte Chemie International Edition. [Read more…]

Theoretically twice as fast, Chinese supercomputer could bump Titan from No. 1 spot

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Tianhe-2 Lights

Lights on the Chinese Tianhe-2 supercomputer, which has a theoretical peak that is twice as fast as the Titan supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. (Photo courtesy Jack Dongarra)

A new Chinese supercomputer is theoretically twice as fast as the Titan supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and it could bump Titan from the No. 1 spot on the Top 500 list that will come out on June 17, one of the co-authors of the list said Wednesday.

Titan, which reached the No. 1 spot on the semiannual Top 500 list in November, has a theoretical peak of 27 petaflops, or roughly 27,000 trillion calculations per second.

The Chinese supercomputer, Tianhe-2, also known as TH-2 or Milkyway-2, has a theoretical peak of 54.9 petaflops. It also has about twice as much memory as the Titan system, said Jack Dongarra, a Top 500 co-author, University of Tennessee faculty member, and distinguished research staff member in ORNL’s Computer Science and Mathematics Division. [Read more…]

Science Saturdays attract hundreds of students for lectures, tours

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Science Saturday Tour of Spallation Neutron Source

Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Clarina De la Cruz, left, gives a tour of the Spallation Neutron Source to Science Saturday attendees Allison Campbell, Michael Campbell, Krista Barrett, and Joseph Gibbs. (Image courtesy of ORNL)

By Morgan McCorkle

Hundreds of science-minded students bypassed Saturday morning cartoons this semester, opting instead to participate in the first year of Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Science Saturdays program.

Open to students in grades 8-12, the program’s free weekend lectures and hands-on activities centered on the science of rainbows, robotics and remote handling, the materials genome, crystals, biofuels, supercomputing, climate change, and more. [Read more…]

ORNL researcher wins DOE Hydrogen and Fuel Cells R&D Award

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Karren More

Karren More

Karren L. More, a researcher at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has received the 2013 DOE Hydrogen and Fuel Cells Program R&D Award in recognition of her leadership of ORNL’s project on microstructural characterization of fuel cell materials and for her role as a subcontractor on multiple DOE-funded fuel cell research and development projects.

More’s experience with a variety of electron microscopy techniques has enabled unprecedented levels of characterization of a variety of materials used in catalysts, supports, ionomers, gas diffusion layers, and membranes. She has collaborated on numerous fuel cell durability and aging studies with other DOE national laboratories and leading manufacturers such as 3M, General Motors, Ballard, AFCC, Nissan, Nuvera, and UTC.

More works in the Materials Science and Technology Division.

ORNL researcher to receive Honor Medal of Aurel Stodola

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Hua-Tay Lin

Hua-Tay Lin

Hua-Tay Lin, a researcher at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has been selected to receive the 2013 Honor Medal of Aurel Stodola by the Slovak Academy of Sciences. Lin is being recognized for his research activities and significant contributions in sciences on high-temperature mechanical behavior of ceramics and composites.

Lin works in ORNL’s Materials Science and Technology Division.

Research effort deep under ground could sort out cosmic-scale mysteries

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Majorana Demo

The Majorana Demonstrator is being assembled and stored 4,850 feet beneath the earth’s surface in enriched copper to limit the amount of background interference from cosmic rays and radioactive isotopes. (Submitted image)

The Oak Ridge National Laboratory has begun delivery of germanium-76 detectors to an underground laboratory in South Dakota in a team research effort that might explain the puzzling imbalance between matter and antimatter generated by the Big Bang.

“It might explain why we’re here at all,” said David Radford, who oversees specific ORNL activities in the Majorana Demonstrator research effort. “It could help explain why the matter that we are made of exists.”

Radford, a researcher in ORNL’s Physics Division and an expert in germanium detectors, has been delivering germanium-76 to Sanford Underground Research Laboratory in Lead, S.D., for the project. After navigating a Valentine’s Day blizzard on the first two-day drive from Oak Ridge, Radford made a second delivery in March. [Read more…]

ORNL researcher discusses 3-D printing Tuesday

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The Friends of Oak Ridge National Laboratory will hold its monthly luncheon lecture meeting on Tuesday.

The meeting will feature speaker Lonnie J. Love, who will discuss the development of 3-D printing and other advanced manufacturing applications at ORNL, a press release said. [Read more…]

Two ORNL researchers, two joint faculty receive DOE early career awards

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DOE Early Career Awards

Pictured from top left, clockwise, are Valentino Cooper, Gaute Hagen, Matthias Schindler, and Jason Hayward. They are 2013 awardees in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Early Career Research Program. (Submitted photo)

Materials science and physics research led by early career Oak Ridge National Laboratory scientists received a boost this week from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science Early Career Research Program.

The program, now in its fourth year, is designed to bolster the nation’s scientific workforce by providing support to exceptional researchers during crucial early career years when many scientists do their most formative work. This year’s 61 awardees were selected from a pool of 770 university- and national laboratory-based applicants.

“This highly competitive program is a well-deserved recognition for early-career scientists who are launching their own research programs,” ORNL Director Thom Mason said. “We are delighted that four of this year’s awards are going to researchers associated with ORNL.” [Read more…]

UT names advanced manufacturing expert as Governor’s Chair with ORNL

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Sudarsanam Suresh Babu

Sudarsanam Suresh Babu

Sudarsanam Suresh Babu, an authority in the production, design, and performance of transforming materials into parts, has been named the 11th University of Tennessee-Oak Ridge National Laboratory Governor’s Chair.

Babu will serve as Governor’s Chair for Advanced Manufacturing. He begins on July 1.

Babu, a professor in the Welding Engineering Program in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at The Ohio State University, directed a National Science Foundation Industry and University Cooperative Research center focused on materials joining for energy applications. [Read more…]

ORNL analysis predicts extreme weather losses could double by 2050

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By Katie Elyce Freeman

U.S. economic losses from extreme weather could at least double by 2050, according to an Oak Ridge National Laboratory analysis published this month in the online edition of the journal Global Environmental Change.

“A side effect of America’s growth has been the tendency to put more people, infrastructure and assets in harm’s way, and when a storm comes through, that increased exposure drives up economic losses,” said author Benjamin Preston, deputy director of ORNL’s Climate Change Science Institute, who studied historical data from more than 3,000 U.S. counties and used predictive modeling in the assessment. Preston works in impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability science, a field devoted to analyzing the effects of climate change on people, governments and industries. [Read more…]