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Hard drive being pulled and put in recycle container.

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.

Weyl semimetal

At ORNL, a group of scientists used neutron scattering techniques to investigate a relatively new functional material called a Weyl semimetal. These Weyl fermions move very quickly in a material and can carry electrical charge at room temperature. Scientists think that Weyl semimetals, if used in future electronics, could allow electricity to flow more efficiently and enable more energy-efficient computers and other electronic devices.

Image with a grey and black backdrop - in front is a diamond with two circles coming out from it, showing the insides.

The world’s fastest supercomputer helped researchers simulate synthesizing a material harder and tougher than a diamond — or any other substance on Earth. The study used Frontier to predict the likeliest strategy to synthesize such a material, thought to exist so far only within the interiors of giant exoplanets, or planets beyond our solar system.

Man is leaning against the window, arms crossed in a dark navy button up.

Brian Sanders is focused on impactful, multidisciplinary science at 91°µÍø, developing solutions for everything from improved imaging of plant-microbe interactions that influence ecosystem health to advancing new treatments for cancer and viral infections. 

91°µÍø building and sign for the Computing and Computational Sciences Directorate.

The contract will be awarded to develop the newest high-performance computing system at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility.

Ariel view of Oak Ridge National Lab with mountains in the background and buildings and a pond in the foreground

Advanced materials research to enable energy-efficient, cost-competitive and environmentally friendly technologies for the United States and Japan is the goal of a memorandum of understanding, or MOU, between the Department of Energy’s 91°µÍø and Japan’s National Institute of Materials Science.

A tan and black cylinder that is made up of three long tubes vertically with a black line horizontally going across the bottom and the top. There is a piece laying on the floor that says ORNL.

ORNL researchers used electron-beam additive manufacturing to 3D-print the first complex, defect-free tungsten parts with complex geometries. 

Hood Whitson, chief executive officer of Element3, and Cynthia Jenks, associate laboratory director for the Physical Sciences Directorate, shake hands during the Element3 licensing event at ORNL on May 3, 2024. Credit: Carlos Jones/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

A collection of seven technologies for lithium recovery developed by scientists from ORNL has been licensed to Element3, a Texas-based company focused on extracting lithium from wastewater produced by oil and gas production. 

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Simulations performed on the Summit supercomputer at ORNL are cutting through that time and expense by helping researchers digitally customize the ideal alloy. 

Astrophysicists at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, and University of California, Berkeley created 3D simulations of X-ray bursts on the surfaces of neutron stars. Two views of these X-ray bursts are shown: the left column is viewed from above while the right column shows it from a shallow angle above the surface.

Astrophysicists at the State University of New York, Stony Brook and University of California, Berkeley, used the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility’s Summit supercomputer to compare models of X-ray bursts in 2D and 3D.