The universe just got a whole lot bigger — or at least in the world of computer simulations, that is. In early November, researchers at the Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory used the fastest supercomputer on the planet to run the largest astrophysical simulation of the universe ever conducted.…

Researchers used quantum simulations to obtain new insights into the nature of neutrinos — the mysterious subatomic particles that abound throughout the universe — and their role in the deaths of massive stars. The study relied on support from the Quantum Computing User Program, or QCUP, and the Quantum Science Center, a national Quantum Information…

Understanding how a thermonuclear flame spreads across the surface of a neutron star — and what that spreading can tell us about the relationship between the neutron star’s mass and its radius — can also reveal a lot about the star’s composition. Neutron stars — the compact remnants of supernova…

A research team from the University of California, Santa Cruz, have used the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility’s Summit supercomputer to run one of the most complete cosmological models yet to probe the properties of dark matter — the hypothetical cosmic web of the universe that largely remains a mystery…

With the world’s first exascale supercomputer now fully open for scientific business, researchers can thank the early users who helped get the machine up to speed. Frontier set a new record for computational power when the HPE Cray EX supercomputer at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory debuted…

A team that includes researchers from the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility recently received an R&D 100 Award for their work on Flash-X, a multiphysics simulation software package with applications that include modeling the collapse and explosion of a massive star core, better known as a supernova. Flash-X was developed…

Computational users at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) are running scientific codes on Frontier’s architecture in the form of a powerful test system at the OLCF called Crusher. Frontier, an HPE Cray EX supercomputer capable of 1018 calculations per second—or 10 with 18 zeroes—was installed in late 2021 and is…

The Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) wrapped up its 2021 hackathon with teams from around the globe working on projects that spanned the cosmos. Ten teams with a total of 71 participants from 21 organizations took part in the October hackathon hosted by the OLCF, home to Summit, the nation’s…

Simulations performed on Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Summit supercomputer provide a more detailed look at how stars die and could help unlock new insights into the origins of Earth’s heavy elements. The study, conducted by scientists at ORNL and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, modeled the collapse and explosion of…

At the heart of some of the smallest and densest stars in the universe lies nuclear matter that might exist in never-before-observed exotic phases. Neutron stars, which form when the cores of massive stars collapse in a luminous supernova explosion, are thought to contain matter at energies greater than what…

Five years ago this month, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory, or LIGO, made its first detection of gravitational waves, marking a historic event in the astrophysics community. Since then, LIGO has reported more than 50 gravitational wave observations. Often generated by collisions of compact astrophysical objects—such as black holes or…

Bronson Messer—a computational astrophysicist, Distinguished Scientist in the Scientific Computing and Theoretical Physics groups at the US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), and a former Jeopardy! champion—has been named the new director of science for the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF). As director of science,…

As GPU architectures have become the standard for scientific computing, application teams have had to retrofit their scientific codes to run on new systems. Even teams with codes that have been re-engineered for GPUs must continually adapt them for new architectures. Evan Schneider of Princeton University, though, began developing her…

Titan, the groundbreaking Cray XK7 supercomputer operated by the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) at the US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), was officially decommissioned on August 1. The petascale machine ran countless simulations over its 7 years of service, and its sheer computational power…

Using the Titan supercomputer at the US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a team of astrophysicists created a set of galactic wind simulations of the highest resolution ever performed. The simulations will allow researchers to gather and interpret more accurate, detailed data that explains how galactic winds affect…

Will Fox, a research scientist at the US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) and long-time user of the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), has received the 2019 Thomas H. Stix Award for Outstanding Early Career Contributions to Plasma Physics Research from the American Physical Society.…

Frontier is an exascale computer planned for delivery at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility in 2021. The system will support a wide range of scientific applications for advanced modeling and simulation, as well as high-performance data analytics and artificial intelligence. In the “Science at Exascale” Q&A series, researchers working…

The American Physical Society's "Quarks to the Cosmos" meeting took place April 13–16 in Denver. Bronson Messer, a computational scientist at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), gave an invited talk at the American Physical Society’s (APS’s) “Quarks to the Cosmos” April meeting in Denver, detailing his current work…

In 2017, the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility celebrated 25 years of leadership in high-performance computing. This article is part of a series summarizing a dozen significant contributions to science enabled by OLCF resources. The full report is available here. In 2007, researchers shone a galactic-sized light on the dark matter…

In 2017, the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility celebrated 25 years of leadership in high-performance computing. This article is part of a series summarizing a dozen significant contributions to science enabled by OLCF resources. The full report is available here. In 2003, a group of computational astrophysicists led by ORNL’s Anthony…