I am thrilled to share my experience of the 75th anniversary of ORNL with you! Celebrations started on June 8th with the initiative “Take Your Child to Work Day”, followed by the “Launch of the Summit supercomputer”, “Lab Day” on June 9th and finished June 11th with an “IceCream afternoon for Summer Interns”. This video summarizes some events of these historic and special days.
Take your Child to Work Day
There were trucks for science fair projects presented by many different divisions. Our NCCS division was lead by Katie and Scott with the “What’s your Problem” truck, where Tiny Titan’s features and power to solve problems were presented. Here are some photos inside the tour and of others volunteers that helped during this day:
I was also impressed by how well other divisions’ demonstrations encouraged children to be interested in science because of the way they interacted and were so curious about the projects:
Launching Summit
Summit was officially launched at ORNL on June 8th. It is now the fastest supercomputer in the world that computes at exascale using mixed precision calculations. It is a IBM AC922 system, which links more than 27,000 NVIDIA Volta GPUs with more than 9,000 IBM Power9 CPUs to provide unprecedented opportunities for the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and scientific discovery. We had the honor to witness the announcement made by Ginni Rometty (IBM CEO), Jensen Huang (CEO Nvidia), Thomas Zacharia (Director of ORNL) and Rick Perry (Secretary DoE US). If you have a project in mind that need super calculations, you are welcome to submit a proposal to use Summit!
In my eyes, it is not enough to have the best technical resources to do research, it is also about efficient people who are able to help and share technical support with others for science. So far I got lessons and innovative ideas from seminars that emphasize that our efforts can help the society in a range of fields. Receiving kind help from coworkers that makes my daily work easier. I really appreciate their support!
Lab Day
My journey started at 7 am with my dear friend Valerie, and then I started a morning shift to encourage people and children to read more about HPC and supercomputers. Meanwhile some conferences took placed in the auditorium according to the schedule of events. The lab was open for families willing to learn from fun and educational activities such as touring supercomputers Titan and Summit, visiting the reactor, playing with robots and interacting with other projects. Also included was a variety of food, local music, and art science posters among other activities and attractions. I particularly enjoyed the science trivia contest during lunch and playing with hands-on activities.
The day ended around 4pm. My days of volunteering were worth them because I had the opportunity to share time with awesome visitors and staff at ORNL. One special thanks to my dear Valerie F. for her friendship! 
Ice Cream afternoon for Summer Interns
It is a summertime, but in Oak Ridge sometimes we have storms and thunder in the late afternoon. During our ice cream afternoon social planned by ORISE to expand our network of contacts among interns, we were sprinkled by a rain. Still I enjoyed it! 😀
