Oak Ridge Today

Seven ORNL researchers named 2019 INCITE award winners

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Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Jeremy Smith is studying the recalcitrance of biomass to enable cheaper, more efficient biofuels, and other high-value chemicals. (Image courtesy ORNL)

Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Jeremy Smith is studying the recalcitrance of biomass to enable cheaper, more efficient biofuels, and other high-value chemicals. (Image courtesy ORNL)

 

Seven researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have been chosen by the Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment, also known as INCITE, program to lead scientific investigations that require the nation’s most powerful computers, a press release said.

INCITE awards computing time via a proposal process to researchers seeking to harness the power of DOE computing systems at the Argonne and Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facilities to solve some of the world’s greatest scientific challenges, the press release said.

Since INCITE’s inception in 2004, the ALCF and OLCF have continuously undergone significant upgrades to retain their edge in facilitating the most computationally demanding scientific projects. The ALCF’s most recent machine is Theta, an 11.69-petaflop Cray XC40 system whose 280,000-plus cores make it ideal for research at the nexus of simulation, data science, and machine learning. An even more powerful system, the exascale Aurora, is planned for deployment in 2021 and is projected to be capable of a quintillion (one billion billion) calculations per second. [Read more…]

UT, ORNL scientists’ discoveries could help neutralize chemical weapons

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Enzyme Figure

Nerve agent sarin bound to bioscavenger enzyme. (Image courtesy University of Tennessee)

KNOXVILLE—Researchers at the University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory are a step closer to creating a prophylactic drug that would neutralize the deadly effects of the chemical weapons used in Syria and elsewhere.

Jeremy Smith, UT-ORNL Governor’s Chair and an expert in computational biology, is part of the team that is trying to engineer enzymes—called bioscavengers—so they work more efficiently against chemical weapons. The work is a joint effort between scientists at UT, ORNL, and a French national laboratory in Grenoble. Their study was published recently in the Journal of Physical Chemistry.

Nerve agents, such as sarin, are among the most highly toxic chemical weapons. The study focuses on engineering enzymes that catalyze the hydrolysis of nerve agents as a prophylactic approach to diminishing their toxic effects. [Read more…]

Intel funding for UT will develop codes, open computing center at joint UT-ORNL institute

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Joint Institute for Computational Sciences

The Joint Institute for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory is pictured above. (Photo courtesy of ORNL)

KNOXVILLE—Imagine going to the doctor and the doctor peering into your genetic code to determine the best medicine to treat what ails you.

The University of Tennessee in Knoxville has received funding from computer chip maker Intel to develop computer codes to make personalized medicine like this and other transformative scientific discoveries possible.

The funding will open an Intel Parallel Computing Center at the Joint Institute for Computational Sciences, or JICS, at UT and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Parallel computing, used in supercomputers, is a form of computation in which many calculations are carried out simultaneously. The focus of the center will be to take supercomputing to the next level to meet scientific computing demands. Today’s research faces limitations due to the amount of data, time, and energy it takes to run calculations. [Read more…]