From DEIXIS: “On guard”

From DEIXIS

January 2021
Wudan Yan

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory’s (PNNL) Ang Li wants to boost security in high-performance computers. Credit: PNNL.

A Pacific Northwest National Laboratory team is testing machine-learning methods that would detect and possibly block supercomputer intruders.

Though most of the world remains shut down from the pandemic, supercomputers are hard at work.

ORNL IBM AC922 SUMMIT supercomputer, was No.1 on the TOP500. Credit: Carlos Jones, Oak Ridge National Laboratory/U.S. Dept. of Energy.

LLNL IBM NVIDIA Mellanox ATS-2 Sierra Supercomputer, NO.2 on the TOP500

NERSC Cray Cori II supercomputer, named after Gerty Cori, the first American woman to win a Nobel Prize in science.

NCSA U Illinois Urbana-Champaign Blue Waters Cray Linux XE/XK hybrid machine supercomputer,
at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.

Some are simulating the coronavirus in search of therapies. Others are working to safeguard the nation’s nuclear stockpile, predict the weather or study climate change. Although supercomputers are more efficient than the device you’re reading this on, they share a vulnerability to attackers.

At Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, staff scientist Ang Li contributes to a range of projects in the lab’s high-performance computing (HPC) group. Li developed an interest in HPC over a decade ago, when he did an undergraduate internship at the Paris-Sud University in France. While there, he helped build a software framework that allowed programs to run efficiently on both graphics processing units (GPUs) and standard-HPC central processing units (CPUs).

Since then Li has worked to develop efficient software for GPUs – processors originally used to move images and videos quickly across screens. In HPC systems, GPUs can improve and optimize performance. He continued this work as he pursued two doctoral degrees from the National University of Singapore (SG) and Eindhoven University of Technology(NL) before joining PNNL in 2016.

Over the past year, Li and his colleagues in Richland, as part of PNNL’s Center for Advanced Technology (CENATE), have helped develop a way to protect U.S. supercomputers from cybersecurity attacks. The Department of Energy’s Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research started the center a few years ago to investigate emerging computing technologies. Although Li and his team initially studied HPC performance challenges, they eventually shifted their focus because HPC systems are increasingly under cyberthreats. Under the guidance of their program sponsor at DOE, Li and his colleagues began to examine how attackers might exploit these computing technologies.

State-of-the-art HPC systems are hybrid machines comprised of GPUs and CPUs. Those who seek to exploit supercomputers for nefarious purposes would first go for the GPUs – the Achilles heel because of their higher computing capability and because standard security shields don’t cover them.

Li and his CENATE colleagues reasoned that machine learning might be one way to monitor ongoing activities and ultimately block attacks on HPC systems. Such algorithms could be trained to classify events as either normal or malicious.

The team designed recurrent neural networks, machine-learning algorithms that analyzed the signatures of normal versus potentially malicious GPU workloads, with algorithms running on the same computers they’re intended to protect. Most HPC systems have performance counters, which measure the number of events that happen over a given span, such as how much data are fetched from the CPU’s or GPU’s memory and how much power the system is using. Normal and malicious software would produce different values on these counters. “All these things form features that get fed into the neural network in order for it to do its classification,” explains CENATE’s lead and Li’s collaborator Kevin Barker. They used all these different features to draw a line between safe and nefarious applications. The neural network was initially trained with known malicious codes such as password crackers and hashing algorithms.

The CENATE algorithm is a good proof of principle, Li says, and the next step would be to use reinforcement learning based on artificial intelligence so the algorithm might be able to respond in real time. “If you come every time a security operator checks the instance, that attack has already happened,” Li says. “At some point, you might [want to have] some automatic techniques to handle that.”

In the future, this algorithm would be used to protect computational facilities at national laboratories, such as Oak Ridge and Argonne, or other smaller HPC clusters.

Future HPC systems will be more advanced, Li says, with many different kinds of processors. “How to keep them safe will continuously remain a big concern.”

See the full article here.

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Deixis Magazine

DEIXIS: Computational Science at the National Laboratories is the frequently updated online companion to the eponymous annual publication of the Computational Science Graduate Fellowship. The Krell Institute manages the program for the U.S. Department of Energy.

DOE and the Computational Science Graduate Fellowship

The Department of Energy mission is to advance the national, economic, and energy security of the United States; to promote scientific and technological innovation in support of that mission; and to ensure the environmental cleanup of the national nuclear weapons complex. Its Computational Science Graduate Fellowship program provides outstanding benefits and opportunities to students pursuing a Ph.D. in scientific or engineering disciplines with an emphasis in high-performance computing.
The Krell Institute

Since it inception in 1997, the Krell Institute has provided superior technical resources, knowledge and experience in managing technology-based education and information programs, including two of the most successful fellowships offered by a U.S. science agency. Krell is named after the advanced civilization that once inhabited the planet Altair IV in the classic 1956 science fiction movie Forbidden Planet.

From MIT News and PNNL: “Cosmic rays may soon stymie quantum computing”

From MIT News

and

Pacific Northwest National Lab

August 26, 2020
Jennifer Chu

Building quantum computers underground or designing radiation-proof qubits may be needed, researchers find.

An MIT study reports that incoming cosmic rays may limit qubit performance, impeding progress in quantum computing. Credits: Image: Christine Daniloff, MIT.

The practicality of quantum computing hangs on the integrity of the quantum bit, or qubit.

Qubits, the logic elements of quantum computers, are coherent two-level systems that represent quantum information. Each qubit has the strange ability to be in a quantum superposition, carrying aspects of both states simultaneously, enabling a quantum version of parallel computation. Quantum computers, if they can be scaled to accommodate many qubits on one processor, could be dizzyingly faster, and able to handle far more complex problems, than today’s conventional computers.

But that all depends on a qubit’s integrity, or how long it can operate before its superposition and the quantum information are lost — a process called decoherence, which ultimately limits the computer run-time. Superconducting qubits — a leading qubit modality today — have achieved exponential improvement in this key metric, from less than one nanosecond in 1999 to around 200 microseconds today for the best-performing devices.

But researchers at MIT, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) have found that a qubit’s performance will soon hit a wall.

In a paper published today in Nature, the team reports that the low-level, otherwise harmless background radiation that is emitted by trace elements in concrete walls and incoming cosmic rays are enough to cause decoherence in qubits. They found that this effect, if left unmitigated, will limit the performance of qubits to just a few milliseconds.

Natural radiation may interfere with both superconducting dark matter detectors (seen here) and superconducting qubits. Credit: Timothy Holland, PNNL.

Natural radiation in the form of X-rays, beta rays, cosmic rays and gamma rays can penetrate a superconducting qubit and interfere with quantum coherence. Credit: Michael Perkins, PNNL

Given the rate at which scientists have been improving qubits, they may hit this radiation-induced wall in just a few years. To overcome this barrier, scientists will have to find ways to shield qubits — and any practical quantum computers — from low-level radiation, perhaps by building the computers underground or designing qubits that are tolerant to radiation’s effects.

A worker in the ultra-low radiation detection facility at the Shallow Underground Laboratory located at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Credit: Andrea Starr, PNNL

“These decoherence mechanisms are like an onion, and we’ve been peeling back the layers for past 20 years, but there’s another layer that left unabated is going to limit us in a couple years, which is environmental radiation,” says William Oliver, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science and Lincoln Laboratory Fellow at MIT. “This is an exciting result, because it motivates us to think of other ways to design qubits to get around this problem.”

The paper’s lead author is Antti Vepsäläinen, a postdoc in MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics.

“It is fascinating how sensitive superconducting qubits are to the weak radiation. Understanding these effects in our devices can also be helpful in other applications such as superconducting sensors used in astronomy,” Vepsäläinen says.

Co-authors at MIT include Amir Karamlou, Akshunna Dogra, Francisca Vasconcelos, Simon Gustavsson, and physics professor Joseph Formaggio, along with David Kim, Alexander Melville, Bethany Niedzielski, and Jonilyn Yoder at Lincoln Laboratory, and John Orrell, Ben Loer, and Brent VanDevender of PNNL.

A cosmic effect

Superconducting qubits are electrical circuits made from superconducting materials. They comprise multitudes of paired electrons, known as Cooper pairs, that flow through the circuit without resistance and work together to maintain the qubit’s tenuous superposition state. If the circuit is heated or otherwise disrupted, electron pairs can split up into “quasiparticles,” causing decoherence in the qubit that limits its operation.

There are many sources of decoherence that could destabilize a qubit, such as fluctuating magnetic and electric fields, thermal energy, and even interference between qubits.

Scientists have long suspected that very low levels of radiation may have a similar destabilizing effect in qubits.

“I the last five years, the quality of superconducting qubits has become much better, and now we’re within a factor of 10 of where the effects of radiation are going to matter,” adds Kim, a technical staff member at MIT Lincoln Laboratotry.

So Oliver and Formaggio teamed up to see how they might nail down the effect of low-level environmental radiation on qubits. As a neutrino physicist, Formaggio has expertise in designing experiments that shield against the smallest sources of radiation, to be able to see neutrinos and other hard-to-detect particles.

“Calibration is key”

The team, working with collaborators at Lincoln Laboratory and PNNL, first had to design an experiment to calibrate the impact of known levels of radiation on superconducting qubit performance. To do this, they needed a known radioactive source — one which became less radioactive slowly enough to assess the impact at essentially constant radiation levels, yet quickly enough to assess a range of radiation levels within a few weeks, down to the level of background radiation.

The group chose to irradiate a foil of high purity copper. When exposed to a high flux of neutrons, copper produces copious amounts of copper-64, an unstable isotope with exactly the desired properties.

“Copper just absorbs neutrons like a sponge,” says Formaggio, who worked with operators at MIT’s Nuclear Reactor Laboratory to irradiate two small disks of copper for several minutes. They then placed one of the disks next to the superconducting qubits in a dilution refrigerator in Oliver’s lab on campus. At temperatures about 200 times colder than outer space, they measured the impact of the copper’s radioactivity on qubits’ coherence while the radioactivity decreased — down toward environmental background levels.

The radioactivity of the second disk was measured at room temperature as a gauge for the levels hitting the qubit. Through these measurements and related simulations, the team understood the relation between radiation levels and qubit performance, one that could be used to infer the effect of naturally occurring environmental radiation. Based on these measurements, the qubit coherence time would be limited to about 4 milliseconds.

“Not game over”

The team then removed the radioactive source and proceeded to demonstrate that shielding the qubits from the environmental radiation improves the coherence time. To do this, the researchers built a 2-ton wall of lead bricks that could be raised and lowered on a scissor lift, to either shield or expose the refrigerator to surrounding radiation.

“We built a little castle around this fridge,” Oliver says.

Every 10 minutes, and over several weeks, students in Oliver’s lab alternated pushing a button to either lift or lower the wall, as a detector measured the qubits’ integrity, or “relaxation rate,” a measure of how the environmental radiation impacts the qubit, with and without the shield. By comparing the two results, they effectively extracted the impact attributed to environmental radiation, confirming the 4 millisecond prediction and demonstrating that shielding improved qubit performance.

“Cosmic ray radiation is hard to get rid of,” Formaggio says. “It’s very penetrating, and goes right through everything like a jet stream. If you go underground, that gets less and less. It’s probably not necessary to build quantum computers deep underground, like neutrino experiments, but maybe deep basement facilities could probably get qubits operating at improved levels.”

Going underground isn’t the only option, and Oliver has ideas for how to design quantum computing devices that still work in the face of background radiation.

“If we want to build an industry, we’d likely prefer to mitigate the effects of radiation above ground,” Oliver says. “We can think about designing qubits in a way that makes them ‘rad-hard,’ and less sensitive to quasiparticles, or design traps for quasiparticles so that even if they’re constantly being generated by radiation, they can flow away from the qubit. So it’s definitely not game-over, it’s just the next layer of the onion we need to address.”

This research was funded, in part, by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Nuclear Physics, the U.S. Army Research Office, the U.S. Department of Defense, and the U.S. National Science Foundation.

See the full article here .

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Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) is one of the United States Department of Energy National Laboratories, managed by the Department of Energy’s Office of Science. The main campus of the laboratory is in Richland, Washington.

PNNL scientists conduct basic and applied research and development to strengthen U.S. scientific foundations for fundamental research and innovation; prevent and counter acts of terrorism through applied research in information analysis, cyber security, and the nonproliferation of weapons of mass destruction; increase the U.S. energy capacity and reduce dependence on imported oil; and reduce the effects of human activity on the environment. PNNL has been operated by Battelle Memorial Institute since 1965.

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The mission of MIT is to advance knowledge and educate students in science, technology, and other areas of scholarship that will best serve the nation and the world in the twenty-first century. We seek to develop in each member of the MIT community the ability and passion to work wisely, creatively, and effectively for the betterment of humankind.

From Pacific Northwest National Lab: “Beauty and the Search for Dark Matter”

From Pacific Northwest National Lab

June 1, 2020
Rebekah Orton

PNNL physicists contribute to the first results from the Belle II high-energy physics experiment.

Belle II KEK High Energy Accelerator Research Organization Tsukuba, Japan

After years of planning, building, and calibration, researchers at the Belle II accelerator experiment in Japan have published their first physics paper.

Their seminal work [Physical Review Letters], with contributions from teams of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) researchers, searched for a theorized particle Z’ (pronounced Z prime). This possible particle could decay into dark matter—the large fraction of our universe that we know exists from astrophysical measurements but haven’t yet measured or seen in the laboratory.

Detection of Z prime and other hypothesized dark matter particles in accelerators is difficult; it requires sensitive instrumentation and the ability to collect and categorize enormous amounts of data. Belle II is the second generation of an experiment located at a high-intensity particle accelerator in Japan that crashes subatomic particles at high speeds in an effort to better understand the visible—and invisible—world around us.

Now you see it. Now you don’t.

Belle II works by taking very comprehensive measurements of the well-understood collision of electrons and positrons. When electrons and positrons collide, they can create and decay into other particles and release energy.

A graphical representation of a typical electron-positron collision in the Belle II detector. Charged and neutral particles, represented by white arcs and isolated “branches,” respectively, leave signatures in the subdetector systems as they escape from the interaction point. This information is used to reconstruct what occurred during each event, to search for rare and new physics processes.
Figure credit: KEK/Belle II.

Belle II’s sensitive detectors, developed in part by PNNL, are able to track all of the energy and particles as they decay. With these detailed measurements and enough collisions, researchers look for rare anomalies—instances when energy “disappears” or can’t be accounted for.

“There’s more than one thing that could escape invisibly,” said physicist Lynn Wood, PNNL’s project manager for the work at Belle II. “We subtract the invisible things that we know about, then the things that are left could be the outliers that validate theories.”

A set of theories known as the “Standard Model” predicts known particle interactions with a high degree of accuracy, but particles such as dark matter or the Z prime are not included.

Standard Model of Particle Physics, Quantum Diaries

If these new particles exist, theorists predict these outlying incidents will happen at a certain rate. If they are not seen in real data, that could represent a flawed theory, or one where the parameters are not tuned to reality.

The challenge lies not only in detection but also in the sheer number of collisions researchers need to understand and interpret. Dark matter decays are often proposed to be so rare that even when the accelerator is working at its maximum rate of several billion collisions per day, researchers might see less than one potential dark matter event per day.

More collisions, more detection

“The Belle II experiment is a complete upgrade from the first Belle experiment,” said PNNL physicist Bryan Fulsom, who has been involved with electron-positron collider physics for more than a decade. Not only does the upgraded accelerator collide particles at a greater rate to collect more data faster, the researcher-redesigned detectors also handle a higher rate of collisions, endure greater radiation damage, and collect signals faster with more detail.

Engaging nearly 1000 collaborators from around the globe, the new experiment began in 2018, to embark on a broad program of new particle searches and precision measurements expected to continue for a decade. The Z prime physics publication is the first of several hundred publications that are expected to be produced by the Belle II Collaboration.

Fulsom cited the “very clean collisions” as the reason Belle II is an ideal experiment to use in the search for particles like the Z prime. When particles collide in Belle II, researchers can measure everything that comes out of the decay and keep track of minute details for an enormous number of collisions.

The Belle II detector consists of several sensitive purpose-built subdetectors. PNNL was involved with construction of the Particle Identification system, has made past significant computing contributions, and continues to perform data analysis in the experiment.
Figure credit: KEK/Belle II

After searching in the small initial Belle II data set, the researchers found no evidence of the proposed Z prime particle. Although they did not immediately discover the Z prime, Belle II will continue to collect orders of magnitude more data for this and other searches.

Even a non-finding can be good news: ruling out the Z prime particle means that researchers can cross that theory off their list and concentrate their efforts on exploring and validating other predictions. The team at PNNL is currently looking for other ways dark matter may be produced in particle collisions and detected by Belle II.

“This is a process of elimination,” said Wood. “Theorists make charts of possible explanations, and experiments mark out the regions that we can exclude. Negative results put restrictions on what is possible and let us measure for particles with different parameters.”

More positives

Belle II complements other PNNL high-energy physics research in the search for dark matter. This includes long-time partnerships on the Axion Dark Matter Experiment project with the University of Washington.

Inside the ADMX experiment hall at the University of Washington Credit Mark Stone U. of Washington. Axion Dark Matter Experiment

U Washington ADMX

PNNL’s expertise in low background dark matter detection also critically contributes to experiments looking for rare dark matter interactions underground by reducing background radiation that can obscure rare signals.

Ultimately, these and other studies lead to better fundamental understanding to describe the world in which we live in ever greater detail.

“Calling something dark matter is a broad way to say it’s particles we haven’t detected,” said Fulsom. “We don’t know what it is and where we’ll find it, but projects like Belle II have a wide physics and technology reach beyond dark matter.”

For example, the detectors developed for dark matter detection and particle physics experiments can have wide-ranging applications in national security, environmental monitoring, and medical imaging. Electronics for these detectors push the limits of design in specialized as well as everyday electronic tools, and the vast amount of data produced in accelerators requires advances in computing and data handling techniques applicable to other areas of big data research.

And as for dark matter?

“We’re confident it exists,” said Wood. “Everyone is trying to find out what it is.”

See the full article here .

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Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) is one of the United States Department of Energy National Laboratories, managed by the Department of Energy’s Office of Science. The main campus of the laboratory is in Richland, Washington.

PNNL scientists conduct basic and applied research and development to strengthen U.S. scientific foundations for fundamental research and innovation; prevent and counter acts of terrorism through applied research in information analysis, cyber security, and the nonproliferation of weapons of mass destruction; increase the U.S. energy capacity and reduce dependence on imported oil; and reduce the effects of human activity on the environment. PNNL has been operated by Battelle Memorial Institute since 1965.

From Eos: “Training a New Generation of Data-Savvy Atmospheric Researchers”

From AGU

From Eos

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the University of Washington team up to teach students about state-of-the-art research instrumentation.

The inaugural atmospheric research instrumentation class at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory toured the Atmospheric Measurements Laboratory’s “skystand” platform, which includes a group of radiometers measuring solar energy at different angles. Credit: Andrea Starr, PNNL

1.30.19

Laura D. Riihimaki
Robert A. Houze Jr.
Lynn A. McMurdie
Katie Dorsey

Scientific discovery in the atmospheric sciences depends on data from field campaigns, surface observations, satellites, and other observational data sets. Many of these data sets and the tools used to collect them are stewarded by national laboratories and government agencies because of the scale of the infrastructure needed to support them. Although some graduate students in the atmospheric sciences have an opportunity to participate in data collection activities, many students graduate without appreciating where the data that they rely on for their research come from.

In an effort to bridge that gap, 10 University of Washington (UW) graduate students traveled to the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in Richland, Wash., in September 2017 to participate in a 2-week intensive short course on instrumentation taught by PNNL scientists and engineers. The goal of the course was to enhance the future research careers of these students by exposing them to state-of-the-art atmospheric instrumentation and data collection techniques and thus help ensure that the next generation of scientists will understand the factors affecting strengths and limitations of observational data used in complex atmospheric studies.

Surveys of university programs in atmospheric sciences show that the number of departments offering courses in instrumentation declined between 1964 and 2000, with fewer than 20% of departments offering graduate-level courses in instrumentation [Cohn et al., 2006]. There is a growing gap between the complexity of modern measurement technology and the ability of universities to provide adequate training to understand measurements. Several approaches to bridge this gap have been successful, such as partnerships between universities and national laboratories (e.g., Storm Peak Laboratory [Hallett et al., 1993; Borys and Wetzel, 1997]), designing courses in which students participate in research flights [Hallet et al., 1990; Fabry et al., 1995], and student-led field campaigns [Rauber et al., 2007].

The approach we used was to offer an advanced graduate course for credit at the University of Washington and embed the course at a national laboratory instructed by instrument experts. The course was designed to develop data literacy in atmospheric researchers who will be using advanced data sets but are not necessarily planning careers in instrument development or operation. The rigor of a for-credit graduate course facilitated a depth of engagement beyond simple demonstrations or descriptions of instruments.

Defining a Curriculum

Jason Tomlinson, director of engineering for the PNNL’s ARM Aerial Facility, demonstrates aircraft sensors to the UW class. Credit: Robert A. Houze Jr.

The course was jointly designed by UW professors and PNNL researchers to produce a curriculum that reflected good pedagogical techniques, in-depth contact with the process of collecting observational data, and hands-on experience.

Twenty PNNL scientists and engineers worked together to teach the course, which included engagement with a range of instruments and measurement techniques used in atmospheric science, such as passive (radiometric) and active (radar and lidar) remote sensing, aircraft in situ measurements, and laboratory measurements in atmospheric chemistry and cloud formation (Table 1). To tie together these diverse topics and reinforce key factors relevant to any measurement effort, each instructor covered a common set of themes: calibration, accuracy and uncertainty, instrument sensitivity, the physics of how atmospheric parameters are sampled, performance in the field, and practical considerations related to siting or operations. The course also covered data logging and data management techniques, which are critical skills for making data sets useful for research.

As a result, the students gained an understanding and appreciation of the full data life cycle, from designing experiments to installing and calibrating instruments, collecting quality observational data, interpreting the data, and archiving data for future use. As described by radar engineer Joseph Hardin, “we tried to present the students with information that went beyond textbooks and addressed the realities of working with these instruments in a research capacity.”

Encouraging Student Engagement

The students took ownership of their learning, using the multiple scientists and engineers at the institution as resource experts. A professor with teaching experience handled assessment and student coordination, but the course content was taught by instrumentation experts. We used three strategies to create this type of engagement.

First, the course created an environment of immersive learning. Instructors gave at least 3–4 hours of consecutive instruction in the morning on each topic and then spent the second half of the day leading interactive activities such as experiments, demonstrations, data analysis, and tours. By capping the course enrollment at 10, interaction between students and instructors was extensive.

Second, student presenters were responsible for summarizing the content of the previous day each morning. This method of assessment allowed further engagement on topics that weren’t clear and required students to take ownership of the information.

Finally, after 2 weeks of instruction, each student designed an individual project with a PNNL mentor. The students were required to pick a project in an area different from their current research to help them engage with new material. We gave the students several weeks to complete analysis of observational data from areas they’d learned about in the class and prepare a short report summarizing their findings.

Students chose to work with data from a wide range of instruments, including broadband and spectral radiometers, multifrequency radars, Raman lidars, and experiments measuring aerosols. Project topics included the utility of water vapor retrievals from Raman lidar for studying the remote marine boundary layer, calculating aerosol yield of isoprene from chamber experiments, and radar retrievals of median volume drop size diameter using observations from the Midlatitude Continental Convective Clouds Experiment.

Training Future Leaders

From the outset, students received the course with enthusiasm: It took only hours for 10 students to register for every available seat in the class. The students also had wide-ranging areas of study, from those who worked primarily with observational data to those who worked mainly with computer models.

“I was really interested in getting a chance to learn some of the nuts and bolts of these observations and instruments I was using all the time,” said Sam Pennypacker, a third-year graduate student who analyzes data out of the Azores from the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Program (ARM) User Facility. “Learning it from the experts, the instrument mentors, you can’t beat that. You can only get so much from reading documentation.”

The students are eager to apply what they learned. Second-year graduate student Qiaoyun Peng will get that opportunity when she participates in a National Science Foundation–sponsored field campaign in 2018: The Western Wildfire Experiment for Cloud Chemistry, Aerosol Absorption and Nitrogen (WE-CAN) will use airborne instrumentation to study atmospheric chemical reactions within western U.S. wildfire plumes.

“I feel much more confident to conduct a field experiment after the course,” Peng said. “It’s also a great opportunity for me to feel what it is like to work in a national lab and get in touch with top scientists in my field to design a small project together.”

Jessica Haskins, a fourth-year graduate student who uses aircraft instrument data in her research, called the class an “unprecedented opportunity.”

“This course was by far the one I’ve learned the most from in graduate school,” Haskins said.

The students expressed that the class filled a missing element in their career preparation and that they would be more effective researchers armed with this newly gained appreciation for state-of-the-art measurement technology and challenges. The success of this effort has encouraged us to pursue this type of course with other graduate students in the coming years.

References

Borys, R. D., and M. A. Wetzel (1997), Storm Peak Laboratory: A research, teaching and service facility for the atmospheric sciences, Bull. Am. Meteorol. Soc., 78, 2,115–2,123, https://doi.org/10.1175/1520-0477(1997)0782.0.CO;2.

Cohn, S. A., J. Hallett, and J. M. Lewis (2006), Teaching graduate atmospheric measurement, Bull. Am. Meteorol. Soc., 87, 1,673–1,678, doi:10.1175/BAMS-87-12-1673.

Fabry, F., B. J. Turner, and S. A. Cohn (1995), The University of Wyoming King Air educational initiative at McGill University, Bull. Am. Meteorol. Soc., 76, 1,806–1,811, https://doi.org/10.1175/1520-0477-76.10.1806.

Hallett, J., J. G. Hudson, and A. Schanot (1990), Student training in facilities in atmospheric sciences: A teaching experiment, Bull. Am. Meteorol. Soc., 71, 1,637–1,644, https://doi.org/10.1175/1520-0477-71.11.1637.

Hallet, J., M. Wetzel, and S. Rutledge (1993), Field training in radar meteorology, Bull. Am. Meteorol. Soc., 74, 17–22, https://doi.org/10.1175/1520-0477(1993)0742.0.CO;2.

Rauber, R. M., et al. (2007), In the driver’s seat: Rico and education, Bull. Am. Meteorol. Soc., 88, 1,929–1,938, https://doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-88-12-1929.

See the full article here .

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Eos is the leading source for trustworthy news and perspectives about the Earth and space sciences and their impact. Its namesake is Eos, the Greek goddess of the dawn, who represents the light shed on understanding our planet and its environment in space by the Earth and space sciences.

From Pacific Northwest National Lab: “PNNL’s capabilities in quantum information sciences get boost from DOE grant and new Microsoft partnership”

From Pacific Northwest National Lab

September 28, 2018
Susan Bauer, PNNL,
susan.bauer@pnnl.gov
(509) 372-6083

No image caption or credit

On Monday, September 24, the U.S. Department of Energy announced $218 million in funding for dozens of research awards in the field of Quantum Information Science. Nearly $2 million was awarded to DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory for a new quantum computing chemistry project.

“This award will be used to create novel computational chemistry tools to help solve fundamental problems in catalysis, actinide chemistry, and materials science,” said principal investigator Karol Kowalski. “By collaborating with the quantum computing experts at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and the University of Michigan, we believe we can help reshape the landscape of computational chemistry.”

Kowalski’s proposal was chosen along with 84 others to further the nation’s research in QIS and lay the foundation for the next generation of computing and information processing as well as an array of other innovative technologies.

While Kowalski’s work will take place over the next three years, computational chemists everywhere will experience a more immediate upgrade to their capabilities in computational chemistry made possible by a new PNNL-Microsoft partnership.

“We are working with Microsoft to combine their quantum computing software stack with our expertise on high-performance computing approaches to quantum chemistry,” said Sriram Krishnamoorthy who leads PNNL’s side of this collaboration.

Microsoft will soon release an update to the Microsoft Quantum Development Kit which will include a new chemical simulation library developed in collaboration with PNNL. The library is used in conjunction with NWChem, an open source, high-performance computational chemistry tool funded by DOE. Together, the chemistry library and NWChem will help enable quantum solutions and allow researchers and developers a higher level of study and discovery.

“Researchers everywhere will be able to tackle chemistry challenges with an accuracy and at a scale we haven’t experienced before,” said Nathan Baker, director of PNNL’s Advanced Computing, Mathematics, and Data Division. Wendy Shaw, the lab’s division director for physical sciences, agrees with Baker. “Development and applications of quantum computing to catalysis problems has the ability to revolutionize our ability to predict robust catalysts that mimic features of naturally occurring, high-performing catalysts, like nitrogenase,” said Shaw about the application of QIS to her team’s work.

PNNL’s aggressive focus on quantum information science is driven by a research interest in the capability and by national priorities. In September, the White House published the National Strategic Overview for Quantum Information Science and hosted a summit on the topic. Through their efforts, researchers hope to unleash quantum’s unprecedented processing power and challenge traditional limits for scaling and performance.

In addition to the new DOE funding, PNNL is also pushing work in quantum conversion through internal investments. Researchers are determining which software architectures allow for efficient use of QIS platforms, designing QIS systems for specific technologies, imagining what scientific problems can best be solved using QIS systems, and identifying materials and properties to build quantum systems. The effort is cross-disciplinary; PNNL scientists from its computing, chemistry, physics, and applied mathematics domains are all collaborating on quantum research and pushing to apply their discoveries. “The idea for this internal investment is that PNNL scientists will take that knowledge to build capabilities impacting catalysis, computational chemistry, materials science, and many other areas,” said Krishnamoorthy.

Krishnamoorthy wants QIS to be among the priorities that researchers think about applying to all of PNNL’s mission areas. With continued investment from the DOE and partnerships with industry leaders like Microsoft, that just might happen.

See the full article here .

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Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) is one of the United States Department of Energy National Laboratories, managed by the Department of Energy’s Office of Science. The main campus of the laboratory is in Richland, Washington.

PNNL scientists conduct basic and applied research and development to strengthen U.S. scientific foundations for fundamental research and innovation; prevent and counter acts of terrorism through applied research in information analysis, cyber security, and the nonproliferation of weapons of mass destruction; increase the U.S. energy capacity and reduce dependence on imported oil; and reduce the effects of human activity on the environment. PNNL has been operated by Battelle Memorial Institute since 1965.

From Pacific Northwest National Lab: “New approaches to chemical and electrical energy conversions”

From Pacific Northwest National Lab

July 16, 2018
Susan Bauer
susan.bauer@pnnl.gov
(509) 372-6083

For the second time, the U.S. Department of Energy renewed funding for a center designed to explore fundamental scientific principles that underpin technologies such as solar energy and fuel cells. Researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, together with partners at Yale University, the University of Wisconsin, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Washington, and Purdue University, earned the renewal through significant achievements in developing catalysts that can convert energy between electrical and chemical forms. Building on their success, and expanding their team, researchers are now poised to take on new challenges.

The Center for Molecular Electrocatalysis was established in 2009 as a DOE Energy Frontier Research Center. DOE recently announced awards of $100 million for 42 new or continuing EFRCs, including this one led by PNNL. The centers are charged with pursuing the scientific underpinnings of various aspects of energy production, storage and use.

Since 2009, CME researchers have been studying molecules called catalysts that convert electrical energy into chemical bonds and back again. Chemical bonds can store a huge amount of energy in a small amount of physical space. Of interest are catalysts that pack energy into bonds involving hydrogen, oxygen or nitrogen. Among the reactions studied are production of hydrogen, which can be used in fuel cells, and the reduction of oxygen, the reaction that balances the oxidation reaction of fuel cells.

In the past four years, the Center for Molecular Electrocatalysis has reported:

the fastest electrocatalysts for production of hydrogen,
the fastest electrocatalysts for reduction of oxygen,
and the most energy-efficient molecular electrocatalyst for reduction of oxygen.

These fundamental scientific discoveries are important for our energy future. For example, a catalyst breaks chemical bonds to produce electricity in a fuel cell. An energy-efficient catalyst produces more power from fuel than an inefficient one — and fuel cells for vehicles need to release energy as fast as the explosions in a gasoline engine do.

These efforts have sharpened scientists’ understanding of the central challenges in the field and laid the foundation for the ambitious goals for future studies.

Directed by PNNL chemist Morris Bullock, the Center for Molecular Electrocatalysis expects to receive $3.2 million per year for the next four years and involve researchers from several complementary disciplines.

“We are excited to be able to further our scientific mission by developing new approaches to circumventing traditional relationships found between rates and energy efficiency,” said Bullock. “These parameters are often correlated, such that improvements in one are obtained at the expense of the others. Typically, the faster catalysts are less energy efficient, and the more energy efficient catalysts are slower. To make breakthrough progress, we seek to remarkably improve catalyst performance through system-level design.”

PNNL leads another Energy Frontier Research Center, Interfacial Dynamics in Radioactive Environments and Materials (IDREAM) which is focused on solving the chemistry challenges found in tanks holding a wide array of radioactive chemical waste generated from weapons production.

See the full article here .

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) is one of the United States Department of Energy National Laboratories, managed by the Department of Energy’s Office of Science. The main campus of the laboratory is in Richland, Washington.

PNNL scientists conduct basic and applied research and development to strengthen U.S. scientific foundations for fundamental research and innovation; prevent and counter acts of terrorism through applied research in information analysis, cyber security, and the nonproliferation of weapons of mass destruction; increase the U.S. energy capacity and reduce dependence on imported oil; and reduce the effects of human activity on the environment. PNNL has been operated by Battelle Memorial Institute since 1965.

From PNNL: “New catalyst meets challenge of cleaning exhaust from modern engines”

PNNL Lab

EMSL

December 14, 2017
Susan Bauer
susan.bauer@pnnl.gov
(509) 372-6083

Innovation also uses less platinum, expensive component of catalytic converters.

Researchers discovered a new type of active site (dashed green circles) which meets the dual challenge of achieving high activity and thermal stability in single-atom catalysts to improve vehicle emissions. No image credit.

As cars become more fuel-efficient, less heat is wasted in the exhaust, which makes it harder to clean up the pollutants are being emitted. But researchers have recently created a catalyst capable of reducing pollutants at the lower temperatures expected in advanced engines. Their work, published this week in Science magazine, a leading peer-reviewed research journal, presents a new way to create a more powerful catalyst while using smaller amounts of platinum, the most expensive component of emission-control catalysts.

The recent findings grew out of a collaboration between research groups led by Yong Wang, who holds a joint appointment at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and is a Voiland Distinguished Professor at Washington State University’s Gene and Linda Voiland School of Chemical Engineering and Bioengineering and Abhaya Datye, a distinguished professor at the University of New Mexico.

Catalysts have been an integral part of the exhaust systems of diesel- and gasoline-powered engines since the mid-1970s when federal regulations called for reductions of carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons and nitrogen oxides. Catalytic converters transform the pollutants to nitrogen, carbon dioxide and water.

The researchers addressed the daunting challenge of designing a catalyst that could endure engine exhaust temperatures of up to nearly 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit encountered under high engine loads. Yet the catalyst would still have to work when an engine is started cold and must clean up the exhaust before reaching 300 degrees Fahrenheit, significantly lower than current systems. The lower operating temperatures during cold start are due to increasing fuel efficiency in advanced combustion engines, which leaves less energy in the tailpipe exhaust, said Datye, a study co-author.

The recent findings build on research, published in Science last year, in which the Wang and Datye groups found a novel way to trap and stabilize individual platinum atoms on the surface of cerium oxide, a commonly used component in emissions control catalysts. The so-called single-atom catalyst uses platinum more efficiently while remaining stable at high temperatures. Platinum typically trades at prices close to or even greater than gold.

For their latest paper [Science], the researchers steam-treated the catalyst at nearly 1,400 degrees Fahrenheit. This made the already stable catalyst become very active at the low cold-start temperatures.

“We were able to meet the challenges of both the high-temperature stability and the low-temperature activity,” Wang said. “This demonstration of hydrothermal stability, along with high reactivity, makes it possible to bring single-atom catalysis closer to industrial application.”

Multiple types of spectroscopy and electron microscopy capabilities available at EMSL, the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, a DOE Office of Science User Facility on the PNNL campus, allowed the scientists to understand the catalyst surface at the atomic level and provide mechanistic insight into how oxygen vacancies migrate to the surface of the cerium oxide, creating pathways for highly active carbon monoxide conversion.

The work was funded by DOE’s Office of Science and Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy’s Vehicle Technologies Office.

See the full article here .

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) is one of the United States Department of Energy National Laboratories, managed by the Department of Energy’s Office of Science. The main campus of the laboratory is in Richland, Washington.

PNNL scientists conduct basic and applied research and development to strengthen U.S. scientific foundations for fundamental research and innovation; prevent and counter acts of terrorism through applied research in information analysis, cyber security, and the nonproliferation of weapons of mass destruction; increase the U.S. energy capacity and reduce dependence on imported oil; and reduce the effects of human activity on the environment. PNNL has been operated by Battelle Memorial Institute since 1965.

From PNNL: “Findings mark a significant step forward for geoengineering studies”

PNNL Lab

November 08, 2017 [Just now in social media]
Tom Rickey
tom.rickey@pnnl.gov
(509) 375-3732

Ben Kravitz

Using a sophisticated computer model, scientists have demonstrated that a new research approach to geoengineering could potentially be used to limit Earth’s warming while reducing some of the risks and concerns identified in past studies, including uneven cooling of the globe.

In theory, geoengineering — large-scale interventions designed to modify the climate — could take many forms. For this research, the team developed a specialized algorithm for an Earth system model that varies the amount and location of sulfur dioxide injections high into the atmosphere. These would, in theory, be needed, year to year, to effectively cap warming.

Ben Kravitz, a scientist at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, is a lead author of the series of papers published in a special issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres. Other authors include scientists from the National Center for Atmospheric Research and Cornell University.

The scientists say there are many questions that need to be answered. The possibility of a global geoengineering effort to combat warming also raises serious governance and ethical concerns.

“For decision makers to accurately weigh the pros and cons of geoengineering against those of human-caused climate change, they need more information,” said Kravitz. “Our goal is to better understand what geoengineering can do — and what it cannot.”

The work was funded in part by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National Science Foundation, NCAR’s sponsor. For more information, see the NCAR news release and animation.

See the full article here .

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) is one of the United States Department of Energy National Laboratories, managed by the Department of Energy’s Office of Science. The main campus of the laboratory is in Richland, Washington.

PNNL scientists conduct basic and applied research and development to strengthen U.S. scientific foundations for fundamental research and innovation; prevent and counter acts of terrorism through applied research in information analysis, cyber security, and the nonproliferation of weapons of mass destruction; increase the U.S. energy capacity and reduce dependence on imported oil; and reduce the effects of human activity on the environment. PNNL has been operated by Battelle Memorial Institute since 1965.

From PNNL: “Scientists create unprecedented catalog of microbial life on planet Earth”

PNNL Lab

November 01, 2017[ Now in social media]
Tom Rickey
tom.rickey@pnnl.gov
(509) 375-3732

Microbiome expert Janet Jansson. Credit: Andrea Starr / PNNL

Credit: UC San Diego Center for Microbiome Innovation

Scientists have taken the most extensive snapshot ever of the vast microbial life on Earth.

By drawing on more than 27,000 samples of soil, tissue, and water from the Arctic to Antarctica, more than 300 scientists at scores of institutions worldwide have created the first reference database of bacteria inhabiting the planet. The findings were published Nov. 1 in the journal Nature.

The study is the latest result from the Earth Microbiome Project, which is led by a trio of scientists including Janet Jansson of the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and colleagues at the University of California San Diego, the University of Chicago and DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory.

Microbes are tiny, but the goal of Jansson and her colleagues from the outset in 2010 was anything but: To sample as many of the Earth’s microbial communities as possible to advance scientific understanding of microbes and their relationships with their environments, including plants, animals and humans. So far the project has spanned seven continents and 43 countries, with scientists analyzing more than 2 billion DNA sequences from bacteria and other microbes.

The team so far has identified around 300,000 unique sequences of the 16S rRNA gene, a genetic marker specific for bacteria and their relatives, archaea. The 16S rRNA sequences serve almost like barcodes — unique identifiers that allow researchers to track bacteria across samples from around the world.

For more information about the work by Jansson and the team, view the full news release.

See the full article here .

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) is one of the United States Department of Energy National Laboratories, managed by the Department of Energy’s Office of Science. The main campus of the laboratory is in Richland, Washington.

PNNL scientists conduct basic and applied research and development to strengthen U.S. scientific foundations for fundamental research and innovation; prevent and counter acts of terrorism through applied research in information analysis, cyber security, and the nonproliferation of weapons of mass destruction; increase the U.S. energy capacity and reduce dependence on imported oil; and reduce the effects of human activity on the environment. PNNL has been operated by Battelle Memorial Institute since 1965.

From Science Magazine: “Emails shed light on controversial DOE request to remove ‘climate change’ from abstracts”

Science Magazine

Dec. 12, 2017
Christa Marshall

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington. Borgendorf/Wikipedia.

A U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) official’s controversial request this summer for scientists to remove “climate change” from research abstracts was ordered by senior national lab managers and was intended to satisfy President Trump’s budget request, according to emails obtained by E&E News and confirmed by a lab aide.

The communications, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, suggest officials at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in Richland, Washington, a national lab funded by DOE, were trying to protect scientists. But the emails also leave unanswered questions about why decisions were made on a Trump plan that was not law.

The senior officials “don’t have the authority to say … ‘We don’t care whether Congress appropriated the funds,'” said Andrew Rosenberg, director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

In August, Northeastern University associate professor Jennifer Bowen started a social media frenzy by posting a letter on Facebook from a DOE employee asking for the removal of climate language from her research summary on salt marsh carbon sequestration. Later, additional scientists who received similar DOE requests identified the sender as Ashley Gilbert, a project coordinator at PNNL (Greenwire, Aug. 29).

According to emails sent between 23 August and 25 August, Gilbert acted at the request of Terry Law, a manager of user services at the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL), a user facility at PNNL.

PNNL spokesman Greg Koller said Law was further directed by “EMSL management” but did not name which officials. It was a “team decision,” he said.

While the identities of affected scientists were previously known, Lane’s directive, the role of senior management and the lab’s full reasoning were not.

Law said removing climate language was necessary because President Trump’s budget proposal called for the elimination of user access for EMSL research related to “climate feedbacks and carbon.”

“Can you look at the 14 abstracts … and find those that talk about global warming or climate change? Then contact the PIs to get different wording? Just explain to them we still have to meet the president budget language restrictions,” Law said to Gilbert on 23 August.

The proposals were from 14 grant winners supported by EMSL and the Joint Genome Institute.

Gilbert then contacted Bowen, University of Arizona assistant professor Scott Saleska and Concordia University biologist David Walsh, who told E&E News he was asked to scrub language in his abstract on terrestrial organic matter transformations in the Arctic Ocean.

“Holy cow, really?” Walsh wrote to Gilbert when first asked to change wording.

“I understand that you are just doing your job, so I will refrain from comment. I redacted the offensive clause,” Bowen wrote to Gilbert.

In an email to Saleska on Aug. 25, Law said the accepted research proposals likely follow the president’s budget request but require revision to “eliminate confusion by others who may not understand the nuances” and “falsely assume we’re funding research that was specifically eliminated for EMSL.” Law did not define who the “others” were.

Once Bowen posted her letter publicly, inquiries from journalists started flowing in to Bowen and Law. Eventually, inquiries were kicked over to DOE headquarters.

In one exchange, Koller floated text to lab officials stating that “we routinely ask folks to modify their abstracts for length, clarity, etc. In this case, it could have been as simple as someone wanting to just highlight the parts of the research that are priorities for this administration.”

In an email interview, Koller said there was a misunderstanding about the intent of the revisions, emphasizing that they occurred after proposals were accepted, and were never a condition of funding.

“There have been no other incidents where PNNL has asked scientists to remove climate change from research proposals,” he said.

“Asking authors to clarify abstracts isn’t unusual in the science community,” he said when asked why DOE was basing decisions on a budget request. The revisions were made so scientists could “clarify the focus of their research plans,” he added.

Rosenberg at the Union of Concerned Scientists said he had never heard of federal officials making such requests based on a president’s budget proposal, which is just a suggestion to Congress.

“I think that’s crazy,” he said.

It didn’t help the situation that Congress so rarely meets budget deadlines, but the revisions still should not have happened, he said.

DOE spokeswoman Shaylyn Hynes said “the short answer is no” when asked whether DOE headquarters directed PNNL managers.

After Bowen’s post this summer, Hynes said “there is no departmental-wide policy banning the term ‘climate change’ from being used in DOE materials. That is completely false.” Koller said that includes PNNL.

It’s uncertain whether the PNNL incident was an isolated one. When told of the abstracts, one employee at a national lab said he is free to attend conferences on climate change.

Privately, other DOE workers outside PNNL say they’ve been asked to alter climate change language on documents, but internally.

“There are some program offices discouraging the use of the term, but none of these instances are from political guidance,” said one DOE staffer.

Jeff Navin, a former acting chief of staff at DOE in the Obama administration, said the Trump administration created “this mess” by putting the lab in a tough spot.

“They want to fund good science, but they also want to be seen as a team player with the department that funds them. But the question shouldn’t be why PNNL asked for these changes; the question should be who in the administration suggested this prohibition and why.”

See the full article here .

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

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