Feature Stories

Artificial intelligence, high-throughput experimentation, and materials science expertise combine to efficiently develop next-generation energy storage materials.

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — “They say water is life, and that couldn’t be truer,” said Anne Francis, who has spent her life on the Navajo Nation, watching how water sustains the land, the crops and the herds of cattle on her family ranch.

But life on the Navajo Nation is hard.

The vast landscape is dotted with old-fashioned windmills, and many places are untouched by modern conveniences like electricity. Without the right infrastructure, getting water where it needs to go has been a struggle for generations.

A new technology, developed in partnership with Sandia National Laboratories and New Mexico State University, is transforming that struggle into a sustainable solution.

Nuclear engineers learn about advancements in nuclear reactor design at Argonne-hosted summer school.

When an aggressive cancer launches an invasion on the human body, anything that can be done to slow down or better understand that fast-paced assault is going to be a bonus.

A broad-based look at the future of Argonne research.

The test represented the culmination of nearly three years of collaboration between Jefferson Lab and ESnet to develop a novel networking hardware prototype that can connect scientific instruments to computing clusters over a wide-area network such as ESnet’s in real time. The EJFAT device uses traffic-shaping and load-balancing field programmable gate arrays that are designed to allow data from multiple types of scientific instruments to be streamed and processed in real time (or near real time) by multiple high-performance computing facilities.

The Summit supercomputer, once the world’s most powerful, is set to be decommissioned by the end of 2024 to make way for the next-generation supercomputer. Over the summer, crews began dismantling Summit’s Alpine storage system, shredding over 40,000 hard drives with the help of ShredPro Secure, a local East Tennessee business. This partnership not only reduced costs and sped up the process but also established a more efficient and secure method for decommissioning large-scale computing systems in the future.

Distinguished materials scientist Takeshi Egami has spent his career revealing the complex atomic structure of metallic glass and other liquids. He studies these materials at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. 

 

As winners of the 2024 U.S. Department of Energy’s Early Career Research Program, four scientists from Argonne National Laboratory are each receiving an award of $550,000 a year for five years to help them answer complex questions.

As high-tech companies ramp up construction of massive data centers to meet the business boom in artificial intelligence, one component is becoming an increasingly rare commodity: electricity. With decades of experience in making HPC more energy efficient, the OLCF may serve as a resource for best “bang for the buck” practices in a suddenly burgeoning industry.