ORNL at AGU

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Welcome to AGU!

ORNL’s Earth systems experts are looking forward to engaging with colleagues across the geophysical research community. Stop by our booth and see our team in the exhibition hall. Use the app to find the time and location of our great presentations this week. In the meantime, explore our environmental, computing, and geospatial resources below!

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Solving Big Problems

At Oak Ridge National Laboratory, we deliver scientific discoveries and technical breakthroughs needed to realize solutions in energy and national security and provide economic benefit to the nation. We address national needs through impactful research and world-leading research centers. A wide range of partnerships with other US Department of Energy laboratories and programs, universities, and industry pairs our strengths with others for outstanding contributions to science.

Explore Big Science at ORNL

Our capabilities help bolster national competitiveness and secure access to resources essential for energy and defense.

ORNL’s AI Initiative is dedicated to ensuring safe, trustworthy, and energy-efficient AI in the service of scientific research and national security. We leverage ORNL’s computing infrastructure and software capabilities to expedite time-to-solution and realize the potential of AI in projects of national and strategic importance.

We develop advanced tools to predict and prepare for natural and human-caused disturbances — including severe weather, cyber threats, and supply chain vulnerabilities — that could disrupt energy generation and delivery throughout the grid. These insights enable comprehensive planning for the future of U.S. energy systems by supporting siting, modernization, and long-term reliability of national energy operations. 

Severe weather and adversarial cyberattacks pose ongoing threats to our nation’s critical infrastructure, potentially putting human lives at risk. Working with industry and government partners, we leverage ORNL’s resources to create tools that empower infrastructure managers, emergency managers, and resource planners to better understand interdependent critical systems and make them more resilient in case of extreme events or attacks.

We deliver environmental intelligence tools to support the exploration, extraction, and domestic development of critical minerals and materials. These capabilities help fortify U.S. supply chains and ensure access to the resources that underpin advanced energy systems and technologies.

Leveraging over 15 years of Arctic research in polar and remote regions, our scientists are the leading experts in understanding permafrost, hydrology, and landscape dynamics that affect infrastructure performance in polar regions. Our team advances models and decision-support tools for siting and maintaining critical energy infrastructure in extreme environments, ensuring long-term, reliable energy access, road construction, and environmental resilience in areas vital to national interests.

We deliver forecasting and modeling capabilities that predict freshwater availability for energy generation — including nuclear, hydropower, and bioenergy crops — as well water resources for agriculture and public health. These insights support long-term planning for resilient energy infrastructure and sustained industrial productivity.

With core strengths in machine learning for high-performance computing, geoassurance, probabilistic reasoning, and spatio-temporal analytics, we are developing geospatial artificial intelligence methods.

For nearly 25 years, our researchers have delivered global, ambient, high resolution population counts for estimating population at risk. Our capabilities span planet-level population data, neighborhood and settlement patterns, and building-level population densities— providing a full spectrum of population and human location intelligence to support national security partners and the humanitarian community.

Biological & Environmental Systems Science

We focus on expanding understanding of foundational science to develop innovative strategies and technologies that support the nation’s economic prosperity, energy security, and global competitiveness while sustaining Earth’s natural resources. We combine field expertise, environmental intelligence, high-performance computing, and AI to deliver breakthrough science and tools that support U.S. energy and national security priorities.

Explore Biological & Environmental Research

299

Staff in Biological & Environmental Systems Science

21

Research groups focusing on biology and environmental sciences

1,756

Journal publications in the past 5 years

43

Patents in the past 5 years

Geospatial Science & Human Security

Our science — a unique integration of human dynamics, location intelligence, geospatial AI, remote sensing, autonomous systems, resilient communications, and high-performance computing — is transforming how we observe, analyze, and visualize landscape and human dynamics across the world to provide decision-makers with novel insights on human populations, the built environment, and critical infrastructures.

Explore Geospatial Research

16

National security research labs & testbeds

60

Federal partners

20

U.S. critical infrastructure datasets

100+

Countries aided in nuclear nonproliferation activities

Computing & Computational Sciences

We have an immense store of computing power and a talented staff of computational scientists and mathematicians, conducting state-of-the-art research and development in support of the Department of Energy’s missions and programs. In addition to our AI Initiative, ORNL also houses the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, home to the world’s first exascale supercomputer, Frontier, as well as the Quantum Science Center.

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Frontier: America’s Exascale Computing Future

Exascale is the next level of computing performance. By solving calculations more than five times faster than today’s top supercomputers — exceeding a quintillion, or a billion billion, calculations per second — exascale systems will enable scientists to develop critically needed technologies for energy, medicine, materials, and more. The Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility at ORNL is home to America’s first exascale system, the 2 exaflops HPE Cray EX Frontier supercomputer.

Learn More About Frontier

7,300

Square footage of Frontier’s footprint

700 PB

Frontier’s storage system holds 33 times the amount of data in the Library of Congress

2 exaflops

Theoretical peak performance

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