Note: This story was updated at 3:40 p.m.
U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry will make a major computing announcement in Oak Ridge on Tuesday, the Department of Energy said Friday.
DOE did not provide any additional information about the nature of the announcement in a press release on Friday morning.
Perry will be at Oak Ridge National Laboratory on Tuesday morning for a keynote speech at the InnovationXLab Advanced Manufacturing Summit. ORNL is a DOE lab.
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John Mason, left, Auburn University vice president of research and economic development, and CNS vice president for mission engineering Mike Beck sign a memorandum of understanding that will allow the two entities to collaborate on projects. (Photo submitted by Auburn)
Consolidated Nuclear Security, which operates the Y-12 National Security Complex, recently signed an agreement with Auburn University with the goal of creating collaborations in areas ranging from computing to advanced machine tool development, a press release said.
The partnership between the university and CNS, which also manages and operates the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas, was created to formalize areas of interest, identify potential collaborative, and cooperative efforts, and establish a framework and boundaries for future discussions, the press release said.
“By combining the talents and resources of Auburn and Y-12, we’re creating a pipeline that flows both ways,†said Mike Beck, CNS vice president for mission engineering. “We look forward to working with some of the university’s brightest students as interns and grads to help us meet our important national security mission, and we are hopeful they can use our real-world manufacturing environment to help develop and prove some of their projects.†[Read more…]
Note: Oak Ridge National Laboratory has led an eight-year upgrade of the electromagnetic calorimeter used for LHC’s experiment called ALICE  (for A Large Ion Collider Experiment). This detector measures the energies of high-energy electrons and gamma rays to learn more about the conditions of the early universe. Thomas M. Cormier leads the LHC Heavy Ion Group in ORNL’s Physics Division.
On Sunday, April 5, the world’s most powerful particle accelerator began its second act. After two years of upgrades and repairs, proton beams once again circulated around the Large Hadron Collider, located at the CERN laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland.
With the collider back in action, the more than 1,700 U.S. scientists who work on LHC experiments are prepared to join thousands of their international colleagues to study the highest-energy particle collisions ever achieved in the laboratory.
These collisions—hundreds of millions of them every second—will lead scientists to new and unexplored realms of physics, and could yield extraordinary insights into the nature of the physical universe. [Read more…]
Ernest Moniz
Lab Day demonstrations highlight labs’ contribution to U.S. competitiveness and innovation
Submitted
WASHINGTON, D.C.—U.S. Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz last week joined Senator Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, and Senator Jim Risch, an Idaho Republican, for National Lab Day on the Hill. The event highlighted several notable research projects from across the national laboratory system.
Senators Durbin and Risch also formally launched the Senate National Laboratory Caucus, which aims to increase awareness of the reach of the national labs as leaders in developing new breakthrough technologies and discoveries to address some of our nation’s most pressing challenges.
“The national labs continue to advance science, clean energy, and nuclear security in this country, as they have for decades,†Moniz said. “The labs also provide essential capabilities for university and industrial researchers—nearly 30,000 per year—and advance technology frontiers, such as high performance computing and advanced manufacturing.†[Read more…]
Jack Dongarra
KNOXVILLE—The U.S. Department of Energy recently released a report through its Office of Science detailing the Top 10 research challenges in reaching the level of exascale computing, once again calling on Jack Dongarra at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, a press release said.
Dongarra—a distinguished professor in the College of Engineering’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, director of the Innovative Computing Laboratory and one of five National Academy of Engineering members at UT—has long been at the forefront of exascale computing, or computing at roughly a thousand times the capability of recent supercomputers.
An icon in his field, Dongarra is a lead author of the Top500, a list he helped start in 1993 to measure the world’s fastest computers as well as numerous software packages for high-performance computing. [Read more…]
Jack Dongarra
Professor also ORNL researcher, co-author of Top 500 ranking of the world’s most powerful supercomputers
KNOXVILLE—The U.S. Department of Energy recently released a report co-chaired by Jack Dongarra, a distinguished professor at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, in which he stresses the importance of prioritizing research into high-end mathematics to help keep the United States on the cutting edge of computing.
“Exascale computing (capable of one quintillion floating point operations per second) will enable us to solve problems in ways that are not feasible today and will result in significant scientific breakthroughs,” said Dongarra, of UT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “However, the transition to exascale poses numerous scientific and technological challenges.”
Dongarra, one of five National Academy of Engineering members on the faculty of UT’s College of Engineering, said that increased funding for the development of new models and ways of gathering data is key to unlocking a number of those challenges. [Read more…]
