National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center Archives

Summit at ORNL still No. 2 supercomputer

Posted at 8:22 am November 16, 2021
By John Huotari Leave a Comment

The Summit supercomputer, an IBM system that is the world’s second-most powerful, is pictured above at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. (Photo courtesy Katie Bethea/ORNL)

The Summit supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory remained the fastest system in the United States and the second-most powerful in the world in the biannual TOP500 list released Monday.

Fugaku in Kobe, Japan, remained No. 1, where it has been since June 2020. The 442-petaflop system has been at the top of the list four consecutive times.

Summit, an IBM system, was the world’s most powerful supercomputer from June 2018 to November 2019, when the U.S. Department of Energy had the two fastest systems in the world. DOE still has the second and third most powerful supercomputers, Summit at number two and Sierra at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California at number three.

Fugaku is installed at the Riken Center for Computational Science. It was co-developed by Riken and Fujitsu, and it has 7,630,848 cores. It is based on Fujitsu’s custom ARM A64FX processor, TOP500 said. Fugaku uses a Fujitsu interconnect known as Tofu D to transfer data between nodes.

TOP500 said Fugaku’s 442-petaflop performance on a benchmark test makes it three times as powerful as Summit, which has 2,414,592 cores. The TOP500 list uses a benchmark test to rank the world’s most powerful supercomputers.

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*The Summit supercomputer, an IBM system that is the world’s second-most powerful, is pictured above at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. (Photo courtesy Katie Bethea/ORNL)*

The Summit supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory remained the fastest system in the United States and the second-most powerful in the world in the biannual TOP500 list released Monday.

Fugaku in Kobe, Japan, remained No. 1, where it has been since June 2020. The 442-petaflop system has been at the top of the list four consecutive times.

The Summit supercomputer, an IBM system that is the world’s second-most powerful, is pictured above at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. (Photo courtesy Katie Bethea/ORNL)

The Summit supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory remained the fastest system in the United States and the second-most powerful in the world in the biannual TOP500 list released Monday.

Fugaku in Kobe, Japan, remained No. 1, where it has been since June 2020. The 442-petaflop system has been at the top of the list four consecutive times.

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China passes U.S. in number of top supercomputers; ORNL’s Titan drops to 5th

Posted at 9:49 am November 13, 2017
By John Huotari Leave a Comment

The Titan supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory is pictured above. (Photo by ORNL/U.S. Department of Energy)

China has passed the United States in the total number of top ranked supercomputers, and Titan at Oak Ridge National Laboratory has dropped from fourth to fifth on the TOP500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers.

The TOP500 list is released twice a year, once in June and once in November. It is based on a benchmark test known as Linpack.

Titan at ORNL dropped from third to fourth in June, bumped from the number three spot by the upgraded Piz Daint, a Cray XC50 system installed at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre. Titan is capable of 17.59 petaflops. A petaflop is one quadrillion calculations per second. That’s 1,000 trillion calculations per second. Piz Daint is capable of 19.59 petaflops.

That power is useful in scientific research. At ORNL, Titan is used for research in areas such as materials science, nuclear energy, combustion, and climate science. ORNL is a U.S. Department of Energy laboratory.

Titan slipped one more spot in this month’s list, from fourth to fifth. It was displaced by the upgraded Gyoukou supercomputer. That is a ZettaScaler-2.2 system capable of 19.14 petaflops and deployed at Japan’s Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, the home of the Earth Simulator. [Read more…]

‘Atomic switcheroo’ explains origins of thin-film solar cell mystery

Posted at 10:40 am May 4, 2014
By Oak Ridge Today Staff Leave a Comment

Cross-sectional electron beam-induced current maps show the difference in cadmium telluride solar cells before (pictured above) and after (below) cadmium chloride treatment. The increased brightness after treatment indicates higher current collection at the grain boundaries. (Submitted photo)

Treating cadmium-telluride (CdTe) solar cell materials with cadmium-chloride improves their efficiency, but researchers have not fully understood why. Now, an atomic-scale examination of the thin-film solar cells led by Oak Ridge National Laboratory has answered this decades-long debate about the materials’ photovoltaic efficiency increase after treatment.

A research team from ORNL, the University of Toledo, and the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory used electron microscopy and computational simulations to explore the physical origins of the unexplained treatment process. The results are published in Physical Review Letters, or PRL.

Thin-film CdTe solar cells are considered a potential rival to silicon-based photovoltaic systems because of their theoretically low cost per power output and ease of fabrication. Their comparatively low historical efficiency in converting sunlight into energy, however, has limited the technology’s widespread use, especially for home systems. [Read more…]

Neutrons, electrons, and theory reveal secrets of natural gas reserves

Posted at 11:10 pm October 28, 2013
By Oak Ridge National Laboratory Leave a Comment

Scanning Electronic Microscope Image of Unconventional Gas Reservoir

A scanning electron microscope image illustrating mineralogy and texture of an unconventional gas reservoir. Note that nanoporosity is not resolvable with this image. SANS and USANS analysis is required to quantify pore size distribution and interconnectivity. (Photo courtesy Oak Ridge National Laboratory)

Gas and oil deposits in shale have no place to hide from an Oak Ridge National Laboratory technique that provides an inside look at pores and reveals structural information potentially vital to the nation’s energy needs.

The research by scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy laboratory could clear the path to the more efficient extraction of gas and oil from shale, environmentally benign and efficient energy production from coal, and perhaps viable carbon dioxide sequestration technologies, according to Yuri Melnichenko, an instrument scientist at ORNL’s High Flux Isotope Reactor. [Read more…]

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