LEMONT, Illinois — When scientists at Argonne National Laboratory describe the new Aurora supercomputer and the enhanced user facilities at the Advanced Photon Source, they tend to use superlatives.
“Aurora is huge,” said Katherine Riley, Argonne’s chief scientist. “Think of it as 10,000 computers talking to each other very, very quickly.”
“Think of the Advanced Photon Source as a giant microscope,” says Laurent Chapon, director of photonic sciences at Argonne. “It’s a giant X-ray microscope. You know, kind of like what you have in a medical environment, but a billion times brighter than that.”
Together, these two cutting-edge scientific instruments are poised to revolutionize research across a wide range of fields, from materials science and medicine to climate and energy modeling.
This year, Argonne, the federally funded research and development center in Lemont, Illinois, is expanding the use of these two dynamic scientific tools. Aurora was introduced earlier in 2024, while APS was also launched this year.
Now, the U.S. Department of Energy-run center is inviting researchers to take advantage of this breakthrough technology. Those invitations began earlier this year and will now be renewed in earnest this fall.
“We’ve already had some very successful projects at the Aurora Advanced Photon Source, where experiments are ongoing,” Riley said. “The researchers come from a wide range of backgrounds. You have astrophysics and biology, chemistry, materials science of all kinds, and engineering research. It’s just incredibly exciting.”
Aurora was fully installed at Argonne in 2023. It is one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, capable of performing more than a quintillion calculations per second. This spring, Argonne announced that it had broken the exascale barrier and is now the fastest and highest-ranked supercomputer in the world for the convergence of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence.
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Its immense processing power will enable researchers to tackle complex simulations and data analysis tasks that were previously infeasible.
“With Aurora, computation is applied to the problems that we want to solve,” Riley said. “So when we’re looking at problems like energy efficiency, when we’re looking at challenges like renewable energy or improving drugs for different diseases, when we’re looking at ideas about climate change and understanding climate, those are the kinds of problems, among others, that we can solve with this system.”
Aurora will extract data from the Advanced Photon Source, which was upgraded in summer 2024.
The APS, which is housed in a ring so large that the entire Wrigley Field could fit inside it, will generate X-rays up to 10 times brighter than its predecessor, allowing scientists to study matter in unprecedented detail.
By combining the capabilities of Aurora and APS, researchers will be able to study the structure and properties of materials with unprecedented precision.
One of the most exciting areas of collaboration between Aurora and APS will be in materials discovery.
By using Aurora to simulate the behavior of different materials under various conditions, scientists can identify promising candidates for further study. APS-II can then be used to characterize these materials experimentally, providing valuable information about their properties and potential applications.
“This is a revolution for science,” Chapon said. “We can use the power of this giant X-ray microscope to probe very deeply into matter and understand some fundamental scientific questions. This will have a direct impact not only on science, but also on society.”
The launch of Aurora and APS-II marks a significant milestone for Argonne National Laboratory and the broader scientific community. These powerful instruments are expected to drive innovation and discovery for years to come.
Argonne officials say the privately and government-funded research will be conducted with the combined forces of Aurora and APS.
“We’re a national facility, which means anybody can apply to use it,” Riley said. “You don’t have to be funded by the Department of Energy. You don’t even have to be funded by the federal government. You can be a private researcher. You can even be foreign. (Aurora and APS) have gone through many iterations, many reinventions. And so to finally see it up and running is a huge relief. It really comes at a time when we’re making this huge transition in science, with deep learning and artificial intelligence. So these new innovations are allowing us to move from problems we didn’t think we could solve to problems we might be able to solve.”
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