Oak Ridge Today

He once called for eliminating DOE. Now Secretary Perry pledges to be an advocate.

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Energy Secretary Rick Perry drives a 3D printed personal utility vehicle at Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Manufacturing Demonstration Facility on Hardin Valley Road on Monday, May 22, 2017. His passenger is Craig Blue, director of energy efficiency and renewable energy programs at ORNL. (Photo by John Huotari/Oak Ridge Today)

Energy Secretary Rick Perry drives a 3D-printed utility vehicle, or PUV, at Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Manufacturing Demonstration Facility in Hardin Valley on Monday, May 22, 2017. His passenger is Craig Blue, director of energy efficiency and renewable energy programs at ORNL. (Photo by John Huotari/Oak Ridge Today)

 

Note: This story was last updated at 8:30 a.m. May 24.

HARDIN VALLEY—He once called for eliminating the U.S. Department of Energy, but after touring federal sites in Oak Ridge and Hardin Valley on Monday, new Energy Secretary Rick Perry pledged to be an advocate for at least some programs.

Perry, a former Texas governor who was confirmed as energy secretary on March 2, was asked about his comments calling for the elimination of three federal departments, including DOE, during the 2012 presidential campaign. His call to eliminate the three departments probably received more attention than it might have otherwise because, in a moment that received a lot of attention, Perry couldn’t recall the name of the Department of Energy during a November 2011 debate. Some believe that moment helped sink his presidential campaign.

Earlier this year, Perry told U.S. senators during his confirmation hearing that he regretted his earlier call to eliminate DOE. After being briefed on many vital functions of DOE, he no longer believed that it should be eliminated, Perry told the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, according to The New York Times.

During a stop in Hardin Valley on Monday afternoon, Perry acknowledged he’s learned a lot since the 2012 campaign, including in his visit to Oak Ridge and at DOE headquarters in Washington, D.C., and in trips to Idaho National Laboratory and the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in southeast New Mexico.

He suggested he might not be the only one unaware of some of the innovations that have roots in or are developed in places like Oak Ridge, innovations like gene therapy, supercomputing, and 3D printing. The American public may also not be aware of how that “cutting-edge” technology can be used to create jobs and wealth, Perry said.

“Those are things I readily admit I didn’t know five years ago,” Perry said after operating a 3D-printed excavator and test-driving a printed utility vehicle—and learning about other innovations such as supercomputers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and composite work at its Manufacturing Demonstration Facility in Hardin Valley on Monday afternoon. “There are a lot of things that have surprised me.” [Read more…]

ORNL launches new business accelerator for energy tech entrepreneurs

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Pictured above during an Innovations Crossroads business accelerator announcement on Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2016, at the National Transportation Research Center in Hardin Valley are, from left, Mark Johnson, Johanna Wolfson, Moe Khaleel, Thomas McDonald, Charlie Brock. (Photo by ORNL)

Pictured above during an Innovation Crossroads business accelerator announcement on Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2016, at the National Transportation Research Center in Hardin Valley are, from left, Mark Johnson, Johanna Wolfson, Moe Khaleel, Thomas McDonald, and Charlie Brock. (Photo by ORNL)

 

The nation’s top innovators will soon have the opportunity to advance their promising energy technology ideas at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in a new program called Innovation Crossroads. Up to five entrepreneurs will receive a fellowship that covers living costs, benefits, and a travel stipend for up to two years, plus up to $350,000 to use on collaborative research and development at ORNL. The first cohort is expected to start the program in early 2017, a press release said.

A growing global population and increased industrialization require new approaches to energy that are reliable, affordable, and carbon neutral. While important progress has been made in cost reduction and deployment of clean energy technologies, a new program at DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, or EERE, will invest in the next generation of first-time clean energy entrepreneurs to accelerate the pace of innovation, the press release said.

Innovation Crossroads is the most recent clean energy accelerator to launch at a DOE national laboratory and the first located in the Southeast. ORNL is the nation’s largest science and energy laboratory, with expertise and resources in clean energy, computing, neutron science, advanced materials, and nuclear science. [Read more…]

ORNL-led study analyzes electric grid vulnerabilities in extreme weather areas  

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A new ORNL-developed method pinpoints electrical service areas across the southern United States most vulnerable to climate change and predicted population growth, which could inform decision makers about future substation needs. (Photo by ORNL)

A new ORNL-developed method pinpoints electrical service areas across the southern United States most vulnerable to climate change and predicted population growth, which could inform decision makers about future substation needs. (Photo by ORNL)

 

Climate and energy scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory have developed a new method to pinpoint which electrical service areas will be most vulnerable as populations grow and temperatures rise.

“For the first time, we were able to apply data at a high enough resolution to be relevant,” said ORNL’s Melissa Allen, co-author of “Impacts of Climate Change on Sub-regional Electricity Demand and Distribution in the Southern United States,” published in Nature Energy.

Allen and her team developed new algorithms that combine ORNL’s unique infrastructure and population datasets with high-resolution climate simulations run on the lab’s Titan supercomputer. The integrated approach identifies substations at the neighborhood level and determines their ability to handle additional demand based on predicted changes in climate and population.

The new, high-resolution capability can explore the interconnections in complex systems such as critical infrastructure and weather and determine potential pathways to adapt to future global change, a press release said. [Read more…]

New 200-petaflop supercomputer to succeed Titan at ORNL

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Summit Supercomputer Cabinets Graphic

This a graphical representation of the Summit computer cabinets. It is not a photograph of the final design. (Image courtesy ORNL/November 2014)

 

A new 200-petaflop supercomputer will succeed Titan at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and it could be available to scientists and researchers in 2018, a spokesperson said this week.

The new IBM supercomputer, named Summit, could about double the computing power of what is now the world’s fastest machine, a Chinese system named Sunway TaihuLight, according to a seminannual list of the world’s top supercomputers released in June.

Sunway TaihuLight is capable of 93 petaflops, according to the list, the TOP500 list. A petaflop is one quadrillion calculations per second. That’s 1,000 trillion calculations per second.

Summit, which is expected to start operating at ORNL early in 2018, is one of three supercomputers that the U.S. Department of Energy expects to exceed 100 petaflops at three U.S. Department of Energy laboratories in 2018. The three planned systems are:

  • the 200-petaflop Summit at ORNL, which is expected to be available to users in early 2018;
  • a 150-petaflop machine known as Sierra at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory near San Francisco in mid-2018; and
  • a 180-petaflop supercomputer called Aurora at Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago in late 2018.

[Read more…]

Miaofang Chi of ORNL named top scientist at UT-Battelle’s Awards Night

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Miaofang Chi

Miaofang Chi (Photo by ORNL)

Miaofang Chi of the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory has earned the ORNL Director’s Award for Outstanding Individual Accomplishment in Science and Technology.

ORNL Director Thom Mason presented the award to Chi on Friday during the annual Awards Night event in Knoxville hosted by UT-Battelle, the management and operating contractor for ORNL.

Chi was honored for her pioneering early career research in analytical electron microscopy. Chi’s research has advanced the understanding of defect and interface chemistry and structure and how such defects control materials properties at the atomic level. Her work includes the recent development of transformative insitu microscopy methods to probe transport phenomena at the atomic scale.

Chi also earned the Early-Career Researcher Award. [Read more…]

INCITE grants awarded to 56 research projects at ORNL, Argonne

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Oak Ridge National Laboratory Sign

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science has announced 56 projects aimed at accelerating discovery and innovation to address some of the world’s most challenging scientific questions. The projects will share 5.8 billion core hours on America’s two most powerful supercomputers dedicated to open science at Oak Ridge and Argonne national laboratories.

The diverse projects will advance knowledge in critical areas ranging from sustainable energy technologies to next-generation materials, a press release said.

Researchers from academia, government research facilities, and industry received computing time through the Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment, or INCITE, program. The program was created as the primary means of accessing the DOE Leadership Computing Facilities at Argonne and Oak Ridge national laboratories.

“The INCITE program drives some of the world’s most ambitious and groundbreaking computational research in science and engineering,” said James Hack, director of the National Center for Computational Sciences, home to the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, a DOE Office of Science User Facility. “The program has a very strong and diverse collection of projects in 2016, and we look forward to working with investigators to ensure they succeed with their challenging objectives.” [Read more…]

ORNL project director to discuss world-leading computing at noon Tuesday

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Buddy Bland

Buddy Bland (Photo by ORNL)

Buddy Bland, project director of the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, will discuss world-leading computing and ORNL sciences during a lunchtime meeting Tuesday.

The meeting on Tuesday, September 8, is open to the public.

“Today, the Titan supercomputer at ORNL is one of the world’s fastest and most productive tools for science at every scale,” a press release said. “From the composition of nucleons from quarks, to nanomaterials, to chemistry and biology, to transportation, to fission and fusion reactors, to astrophysics, modeling, and simulation using high-performance computers has transformed the way we do science and engineering. This presentation will cover a brief history of computing at ORNL, where we are going in the future, and the impact that computing has on our local community, the nation, and the world.” [Read more…]

ORNL: Neutrons find ‘missing’ magnetism of plutonium

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Doug Abernathy and Marc Janoschek

Doug Abernathy, left, ARCS instrument scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and Marc Janoschek, Los Alamos National Laboratory, prepare their sample for experiments at the Spallation Neutron Source. (Photo by ORNL)

 

Groundbreaking work at two U.S. Department of Energy national laboratories has confirmed plutonium’s magnetism, which scientists have long theorized but have never been able to experimentally observe. The advances that enabled the discovery hold great promise for materials, energy, and computing applications.

Plutonium was first produced in 1940, and its unstable nucleus allows it to undergo fission, making it useful for nuclear fuels as well as for nuclear weapons. Much less known, however, is that the electronic cloud surrounding the plutonium nucleus is equally unstable and makes plutonium the most electronically complex element in the periodic table, with intriguingly intricate properties for a simple elemental metal.

While conventional theories have successfully explained plutonium’s complex structural properties, they also predict that plutonium should order magnetically. This is in stark contrast with experiments, which had found no evidence for magnetic order in plutonium. [Read more…]

ORNL invites companies to connect with lab at ‘Explore ORNL’ 

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Oak Ridge National Laboratory will open its doors July 14-15 for its “Explore ORNL” conference designed to introduce the region’s business community to the lab’s world-class research and development facilities and expertise, a press release said.

“Explore ORNL is an outreach event that provides companies both large and small with a unique opportunity to learn about collaboration possibilities,” said Tom Rogers, ORNL’s director of Industrial Partnerships and Economic Development.

Representatives from companies such as Boeing, Cummins, Local Motors, Ten-Tec, Dresser-Rand, and Eagle Bend Manufacturing will speak about their experiences in working with ORNL experts to overcome technical challenges and develop new products. [Read more…]

Alexander: World’s fastest supercomputer will again be at ORNL

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Summit Supercomputing Press Conference

U.S. Rep. Chuck Fleischmann, second from left, a Tennessee Republican, at a Friday morning press conference at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., with Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, right; Senator Lamar Alexander, a Tennessee Republican, center; and representatives Bill Foster and Dan Lipinski. (Submitted photo)

 

U.S. Senator Lamar Alexander

Lamar Alexander

Note: This story was last updated at 11:25 a.m.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory will have the world’s fastest next-generation supercomputer, U.S. Senator Lamar Alexander announced at a Friday morning press conference with U.S. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz.

Alexander, a Tennessee Republican, said the new computer will provide five times the performance of Titan, the current system, and support advanced scientific and materials research to improve economic and national security.

The “next-generation hybrid supercomputer” will be called Summit, and it will be delivered in 2017, the senator said.

“Once again the world’s fastest computer will be in the United States, and once again it will be at Oak Ridge,” Alexander said. “Supercomputing has helped Tennessee become a center for advanced manufacturing with the arrival of new companies, including several in the auto industry, creating thousands of good-paying jobs. Tennessee can continue to thrive and create many more good jobs with the use of this new supercomputer.” [Read more…]

Supercomputers help ORNL researchers identify molecular switch that controls cell behavior

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E. coli Chemoreceptor Switch

Red and blue molecules represent a conformational switch essential to the signaling mechanism of an E. coli chemoreceptor that researchers discovered using computational molecular dynamics simulations. (Image credit: Davi Ortega)

If scientists can control cellular functions such as movement and development, they can cripple cells and pathogens that are causing disease in the body.

Supported by National Institutes of Health grants, researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the University of Tennessee, and the UT-ORNL Joint Institute for Computational Sciences discovered a molecular “switch” in a receptor that controls cell behavior using detailed molecular dynamics simulations on a computer called Anton built by D.E. Shaw Research in New York City. To study an even larger signaling complex surrounding the switch, the team is expanding these simulations on Titan—the nation’s most powerful supercomputer, managed by the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility at ORNL.

Researchers identified the molecular switch on Anton (which was designed to perform speedy molecular dynamics simulations) by simulating 140,000 atoms that make up the signaling part of the Tsr chemoreceptor that controls motility in E. coli. Like other receptors, Tsr spans the cell membrane, communicating to proteins inside the cell in order to respond to threats or opportunities in the environment. [Read more…]

INCITE grants awarded to 59 computational research projects

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Titan Supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory

The U.S. Department of Energy has announced 59 scientific projects that will share nearly six billion core hours on two of America’s fastest supercomputers, including the Titan supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, pictured above. (Photo courtesy of ORNL)

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science announced 59 projects, promising to accelerate scientific discovery and innovation, that will share nearly six billion core hours on two of America’s fastest supercomputers dedicated to open science. Their work will advance knowledge in critical areas from sustainable energy technologies to the environmental consequences of energy use.

The allocations come from the Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment, or INCITE, program. Through it, the world’s most advanced computational research projects from academia, government, and industry are given access to DOE’s leadership computing facilities at Oak Ridge and Argonne national laboratories. [Read more…]