Argonne National Laboratory

Coordinator: Kyle Felker, Paige Kinsley and Timothy (Tim) Williams

Review abstracts for current and past practicum experiences at Argonne >>

Argonne is a multidisciplinary science and engineering research center where more than 1,400 talented scientists and engineers work together to answer the biggest questions facing humanity — from how to obtain affordable clean energy, to protecting ourselves and our environment. Born out of the University of Chicago’s work on the 1940s Manhattan Project, the laboratory's goal has always been to make an impact — from the atomic to the human to the global scale.

A key element of Argonne’s HPC activities is the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF). The ALCF system includes Theta, an 11.7-petaflops supercomputer based on the Intel-Cray XC40 architecture; ThetaGPU, an NVIDIA DGX A100-based system; and an AI Test Bed. Polaris, a 35–45-petaflop CPU/GPU hybrid resource, is expected to be delivered to the ALCF in 2021. Aurora will be one of the nation’s first exascale systems when it arrives at Argonne in 2022; the supercomputer will be based on Intel’s Xeon Scalable processors and high-performance Intel Xe GPU compute accelerators.

Argonne also operates the Laboratory Computing Resource Center (LCRC), which features Bebop, a 1024-node institutional HPC cluster with both Xeon and Xeon Phi nodes; and Swing, an NVIDIA-based GPU cluster.

Additionally, Argonne hosts the Joint Laboratory for System Evaluation, which houses a range of emerging systems.

Qualified graduate students may use these laboratory resources during the course of their research. Various projects are available for fellowship students in many areas of basic science, including the following:

Artificial Intelligence for Science
foundational and applied machine learning, special-purpose AI hardware accelerators, integration of simulation and machine learning, self-driving labs

Biology
functional genomics, genome sequence analysis, metabolic reconstruction, structural biology, neuroscience, targeted drug discovery and design, cancer biology

Chemistry and Chemical Technologies
computational quantum chemistry, chemical kinetics, energy storage, biofuels, catalyst design and discovery, combustion chemistry

Climate Modeling and Environmental Science
climate model development, design of coupled modeling software, atmospheric carbon dioxide distribution, multimodal data assimilation, precision agriculture, microbial ecological modeling

Engineering
traffic flow models and forecasting, manufacturing science, industrial control, nuclear reactor design simulation, device-scale modeling, turbulent combustion

Materials Science and Nanoscience
vortex dynamics, molecular dynamics, superconductivity, nanoscale photonics, electronics and magnetism

Mathematics and Computer Science
parallel tools and libraries, numerical PDEs, scalable I/O, mathematical optimization, performance modeling, large-scale data analytics and assimilation, cloud computing, computational fluid dynamics, uncertainty quantification, statistical modeling and methods, quantum computing, automatic differentiation, edge computing

Physics and Astrophysics
high energy physics, Monte Carlo methods in nuclear physics, numerical simulations of thermonuclear flashes, extreme-scale cosmological simulations, plasma physics and fusion simulation, machine learning for multimessenger astrophysics