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5 December 2022
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Having everyone in the world complete arithmetic problems for nearly five years sounds like the worst math test ever. But it gives you an idea of just how fast exascale computers are. Exascale computers get their name from how many calculations they can do per second – called floating operations per second, or FLOPS. With their ability to crunch over a quintillion calculations per second, one computer could complete in a mere second the same monumental task that the entire world population could tackle over five years.
The Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Science recently launched the world’s first exascale computer, Frontier, at DOE’s Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility user facility. It is currently ranked number 1 on the Top500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers, as of November 14, 2022. DOE is also in the process of launching two more exascale systems.
Learn more about how DOE developed these exascale systems over the course of years and what the future holds for exascale.
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Exotic Nuclei: A new study led by researchers from DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory measured how long it takes for several kinds of exotic nuclei to decay. The paper marks the first experimental result from the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB), a DOE Office of Science user facility. The work is helping scientists understand the building blocks of matter. |
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Ancient Seawater: Researchers at DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, the University of Toronto, and the University of California, Riverside have discovered liquid remnants of an ancient inland sea inside of a rock from upstate New York. By analyzing the liquid inside of it with tools at the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (a DOE Office of Science user facility), they are learning more about how a changing climate affects oceans. |
Earth’s Mantle: In the past, scientists thought that there were three main minerals in the Earth’s lower mantle: bridgmanite, ferropericlase, and davemaoite. Using a high-pressure experiment that used different styles of heating, a team of scientists from Arizona State University and DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory has revealed an additional mineral residing in the lower mantle. They used the Advanced Photon Source (a DOE Office of Science user facility) in the analysis. |
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Freshwater Resources: A team led by researchers from DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that if global warming reaches around 2.5 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial levels, mountain ranges in the southern midlatitudes (particularly the Andean region of Chile) will face a low-to-no-snow future between the years 2046 and 2051. That is 20 years earlier than mountain ranges such as the Sierra Nevada or Rockies. It would worsen droughts already occurring in these regions. |
Inner Ear: Scientists at the Oregon Health & Science University have revealed, for the first time and in near-atomic detail, the structure of the key part of the inner ear responsible for hearing. This structure converts vibrations into sound. The finding could point the way towards improving treatments for hearing impairments. The team used the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (a DOE Office of Science user facility) in the analysis. |
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The Office of Science posted six new highlights between 11/15/22 and 12/5/22.
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Rethinking Winter Carbon Cycling: Scientists estimate that northern peatlands contain one third of the Earth’s soil carbon. In these places, carbon losses from soil during the winter can exceed carbon storage during the growing season. Researchers at DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory incubated Arctic peat soils under winter conditions. They found that Arctic soils under winter conditions contain a small proportion of active bacteria but a large proportion of active viruses. The interaction between these bacteria and viruses may help to control the loss of carbon from peat soils in the winter. |
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DOE Computer Scientists Receive Top Awards
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Supercomputers enable huge leaps in scientific discoveries. The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) recently recognized researchers at several national laboratories with Gordon Bell prizes for their work. Presented at the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis, the Gordon Bell prizes are considered the most prestigious award in supercomputing.
Scientists at DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as well as their partners at the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission won the ACM Gordon Bell Prize. They created a simulation code called WarpX that improves the design of plasma-based particle accelerators. Plasma-based accelerators could be much smaller and cheaper than current huge accelerators. They would be very valuable for medical treatments and studying ultrafast phenomena. This type of simulation will help scientists design these accelerators with the goal of making them widely available. The team ran the code on Frontier and Summit at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility and on Perlmutter at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, both DOE Office of Science user facilities.
Researchers at DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory and their partners also won the 2022 Gordon Bell Special Prize for High Performance Computing-Based COVID-19 Research. They took a form of artificial intelligence usually used to summarize and translate words and adapted it to interpret the amino acid “language” of proteins. The team trained the model to discover variants of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Similar models could give health officials the tools they need to identify and respond to future variants of viruses. The program was run on computers at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, a DOE Office of Science user facility.
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The Unsung Heroes of Science
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Scientists are essential to scientific research, but so are janitors, technicians, engineers, machinists, facility operators, and more. They ensure that our national laboratories’ facilities, equipment, and workspaces are high-quality and in good working order, allowing scientists to carry out research tasks. Find out how “unsung heroes” support the work at DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory in a feature about how engineers make it possible to conduct discovery science. |
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CommUnique provides a review of recent Office of Science Communications and Public Affairs stories and features. This is only a sample of our recent work promoting research done at universities, national labs, and user facilities throughout the country.
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