John Arrington (left) and Robert B. Ross received their Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers.

June 20, 2005 -- Some of this week's stories:

Two receive Presidential Early Career Awards

Physicist John Arrington (PHY) and computer scientist Robert Ross (MCS) have received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) to recognize their contributions to the advancement of science.

 The presidential awards are intended to recognize and nurture some of the finest scientists and engineers who, while early in their research careers, show exceptional potential for leadership at the frontiers of scientific knowledge during the 21st century. The Presidential Award is the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on outstanding scientists and engineers who are beginning their independent careers.

"The Department of Energy is proud that these researchers are making important contributions, in a wide range of fields, to innovation and technology for energy, economic and national security," U.S. Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman said. "If the outstanding efforts of these scientists and engineers are any indication of the future, I have no doubt they will ensure America's scientific leadership far into the next century."

Arrington's work is helping to shape our understanding of the core of an atom. At one-trillionth of the volume of an atom, the nucleus contains 99.9 per cent of the mass. The nucleus is not a calm in the eye of an atomic storm as once perceived, but a violent tornado of protons and neutrons, some moving at more than half the speed of light. Even slower-moving protons must change direction a billion times every trillionth of a second, Arrington said.

Prior to joining Argonne, Arrington conducted research at Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in Newport News, Va. as a graduate student with the California Institute of Technology.

Ross' research in data storage techniques addresses the obstacles of getting data into and out of parallel computers fast enough to avoid severe bottlenecks. Computers with mammoth needs for data storage, some with 10,000 processors, use Ross' file storage system.

"I started in the area of parallel file systems in 1994. High-performance computing was producing huge amounts of data — hundreds of gigabytes to terabytes — that had to be managed, stored, and analyzed rapidly and efficiently," said Ross. To address this problem, he led the development of a parallel virtual file system and, for maximum impact, made it freely available as open-source software. The code Ross wrote is still used by industry and universities for computational science and data-processing applications.

"My first involvement in national labs was while I was a student at Clemson University. Rajeev Thakur of Argonne invited me to work with him for a few weeks at a time," said Ross.

After graduation, Ross joined Argonne's parallel tools team, applying his expertise to large parallel systems such as Argonne's Jazz cluster, IBM's BG/L, and Cray's Red Storm. Ross is also spearheading the design of a new-generation code that will provide increased scalability, reliability, and performance on advanced computer systems. His work is helping users worldwide overcome the input/output bottleneck that has hampered performance on parallel computers.

Arrington and Ross both attended a ceremony in Washington D.C. June 13 to honor their achievements. They were among 58 researchers supported by eight federal departments and agencies receiving the Presidential Award. Each award winner received a citation, a plaque and a commitment for continued funding of their work from their agency for five years. John Marburger, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, presented the awards.

DISSCO allows scientists to compose music, 'hear' data

By Catherine Foster

A mathematician and a musician have teamed up to create a new computer program that both composes music and creates the instrumentation to play it.

Mathematician Hans G. Kaper (MCS) and musician Sever Tipei of the Computer Music Project at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have worked together for several years on the project. A key feature of DISSCO (Digital Instrument for Sound Synthesis and Composition) is that it integrates composition and sound synthesis in one seamless process, delivering a finished product that needs no further processing.

"The idea is to use the computer as an assistant in composing a piece of music," Kaper said. "The computer takes a general idea and develops sheet music or recorded sound." Kaper knows the concept from both sides; in addition to his position at Argonne, he is also adjunct professor of music in the Computer Music Project.

"It's like writing a symphony and at the same time building the instruments to play it," Tipei added.

The resulting sounds are not Mozart, or Thelonious Monk, or even Moby, but an interesting amalgam of notes. Samples of computer-composed music and computer-composed and sound-generated music are online; see "On the Web," page 2. Included in one sample is a series Kaper and Tipei call the "Argonne chime" — a series of notes created by the computer program that spell the word Argonne — the notes A, Re, G, Sol, two computer-selected sounds to represent the letter "n," and E.

The program serves two major purposes: The ability to create and hear sounds allows students to understand the interplay between structure and randomness in music composition, and the ability to produce sounds from computer data offers scientists a new way to discover the patterns and aberrations in data — "data sonification" instead of "data visualization."

Tipei appreciates showing his students how structure and randomness can blend to enhance the creative process. "The idea is to develop a manifold composition, which is one musical structure which includes some degree of randomness. The end product is a composition that changes every time it is played," Tipei said. DISSCO permits variable degrees of indeterminacy at all levels while producing a fully completed musical product. Parallels are established between the way sounds are grouped in various structural units and the way partial sounds and notes contribute to the makeup of a sound, which leads to the use of similar tools to manage events that occur at different time scales.

DISSCO uses additive sound synthesis to build sounds from sine waves. It allows precise control over each parameter of each sine wave, as well as over the overall qualities of the resulting sound.

"Scientists can use this instrument to explore scientific data by rendering them in a sound file," Kaper said. "The data are used to define the characteristics of the sound wave, such as the way it is tuned, its loudness, its spatial distribution and the amount of reverberation. In all there are more than a dozen useful degrees of freedom that we can build into a sound — more than enough for most physical or computational experiments."

DISSCO is available at dissco.sourceforge.net, and is free software distributed under the terms of the GNU General License.

Accidents can affect entire lab

By Robert Rosner, Argonne Director

A few months ago, I was going down the stairs on my way to work. I had a laptop computer in one hand, a briefcase in the other. My mind was on the coming day's activities. My dog Jamie, anxious for her morning exercises, came down the stairs with me. She got tangled up in my feet; I stumbled but couldn't grab the handrail because my first thought was "save the computer!" Down the stairs I went.

I did save the computer, but I also strained my shoulder. It still bothers me, several months later. On a recent airplane flight, I was unable to lift my bag into the overhead bin and had to ask a flight attendant for help.

I've gone up and down those stairs a thousand times, but of course accidents are one-in-a-thousand events when several factors come together. Therein lies the problem: Accidents by definition are rare events, so we get lulled into a false sense of security.

A recent laser accident here at the lab is a good example. A (very experienced) employee working on a laser table lifted his safety goggles just a bit to scratch an itch — in the one place in the entire room where a laser beam was aimed upwards (that was, by itself, a violation of good practice: laser beams should always be aimed within the plane of the laser table.) The result: a burn to his retina and some loss of vision that may be permanent.

That's why it's so important to plan, test, seek advice of experts, minimize risks. Take your time and take nothing for granted. Avoid shortcuts. When you need help, consult with an ESH coordinator — they do an excellent job of keeping us safe.

There's another aspect to safety: It goes hand-in-hand with the laboratory's public image. Argonne enjoys the trust and support of its neighbors in nearby communities, thanks to nearly 60 years of safe, environmentally responsible operation. Our neighbors know the work we do can be dangerous — and they trust us to do it safely and responsibly.

Injuries and accidents diminish that trust, as do reports of missing or incomplete documentation. Some of our sister labs know what it's like to lose the trust and support of their stakeholders — and how difficult they are to regain.

From double-checking interlocks in the experiment hall to making sure you have a hand free on the stairs, safety should be paramount in everything we do.

Research could lead to cooler aluminum production

Researchers at Argonne National Laboratory and NorandaFalconbridge, Inc. are developing a way to produce aluminum at significantly reduced temperatures. The collaborative research effort could eventually lead to significant reductions in the energy costs and emissions of greenhouse gases associated with aluminum production.

The four-year, $2.25 million joint project is one phase of a long-term effort to improve on the massive electrolytic cells in which aluminum is produced on an industrial scale. In these cells, alumina, dissolved in a molten electrolyte, is stripped of its oxygen atoms by a strong electrical current and converted into the metallic aluminum that makes up products like soda cans and aircraft wings.

John Hryn, the Argonne metallurgist leading the project, said the process usually requires temperatures of 960 degrees C. At that temperature, few materials can withstand the oxygen produced electrolytically inside the cell. Sacrificial carbon anodes have been used in aluminum production since the process was invented by Hall and Héroult in 1886. As aluminum is formed, the carbon anode is consumed by oxygen, and the resulting carbon dioxide bubbles out of the cell.

For many years, researchers have sought a new, non-consumable anode to replace carbon anodes. Hryn thinks the answer may lie in modifying the cell electrolyte to operate at lower temperatures. Several years ago, he and his colleagues discovered an electrolyte composition that can dissolve alumina and produce aluminum metal at 700 degrees C, more than 250 degrees cooler than current electrolytes. “The lower operating temperature opens up the possibility for new anode materials,” he said.

Using standard aluminum-bronze anodes in bench-scale tests at Argonne, Hryn and colleagues demonstrated that the new electrolysis cells operated for 100 hours without any significant corrosion at the anode. Also, the cell produces oxygen as a byproduct instead of carbon dioxide and perfluorocarbon, two kinds of greenhouse gas produced in carbon anode electrolytic cells.

However, Hryn cautions that the largest hurdles still remain. The system must be tested at successively larger scales, each involving higher electrical currents and running for longer periods of time. “At larger scales, we start to see the materials issues emerge,” Hryn said. “Things that seem to work well on the bench tend to fail at larger scales, primarily because you are working at these extreme conditions…. Our advantage is that we are operating 250 degrees lower than everybody else, and that's a big difference for materials.”

The cooperative research and development agreement between Argonne and Noranda formalizes a joint effort that has existed for the past four years. Hryn said it is important for Argonne to have an industrial partner at this stage of the project. “We get their input on what is important to them right at this stage, so as we get larger, we're addressing exactly their concerns. Working with industry early on is really the key to success,” he said.

If the new electrolytic cells are successful and replace the old cells and their consumable carbon anodes, the benefits to the aluminum industry and the environment will be tremendous. The Department of Energy, in conjunction with members of the aluminum industry, released an “Inert Anode Roadmap” six years ago that projected energy efficiency increases of 25 percent, operating cost reductions of 10 percent, and greenhouse gas emissions reductions of 7 million metric tons of carbon equivalent in the United States. Also, aluminum producers using nonconsumable anode technology will not have to purchase carbon anodes or maintain facilities that produce them. “There's a huge incentive to get rid of all that,” Hryn said.

NorandaFalconbridge, Inc. is a leading mining and metals company. It employs 16,000 people at its operations and offices in 18 countries.

Lab, private firm to study near-frictionless coating

A research collaboration between Argonne and the Kurt J. Lesker Company will study the durability of nearly frictionless carbon surface coatings in high-performance, vacuum environments. The coating has a lower coefficient of friction than any other known material. It was developed at Argonne and received an R&D 100 Award for being one of the 100 most important technology advancements in 1998.

The team of Argonne researchers is led by Jacqueline Johnson (ET) and includes Osman Eryilmaz (ET), Robert Erck (ET), John Woodford (ET), Ali Erdemir (ET), Douglas Abernathy (IPNS-SNS), Ralph Niemann (PNS) , and David Chojnowski (IPNS-SNS).

The nine-month Argonne-Lesker collaboration will examine nearly-frictionless carbon coatings as a possible replacement for traditional chemical lubricants, such as greases and oils, used in specialized devices called neutron choppers.

Neutron choppers play an important role in neutron beam experiments like those conducted at Argonne 's Intense Pulsed Neutron Source. Neutron beams are useful probes for studying the arrangement of atoms in materials such as glasses and superconductors.

A neutron chopper is essentially a disk rotated at high speeds, with an aperture through which a neutron beam may pass during certain periods of the disk's rotation. Because of the demand for neutron beam experimental facilities, choppers must operate continuously for long periods of time, and their components must endure high vacuum conditions and neutron bombardment.

Ali Erdemir (ET), a materials scientist at Argonne, explained that chemical lubricants degrade more rapidly in the chopper's vacuum environment. As a result, they limit the operating speed of the neutron choppers and can even reduce the accuracy of neutron beam measurements. Furthermore, because they are made radioactive by neutron bombardment, chemical lubricants must undergo a “cool-down” period before routine maintenance can be carried out. The substitution of the nearly-frictionless carbon coatings for chemical lubricants is “a great opportunity to solve these problems,” Erdemir said. “There is a lot of potential for improving chopper performance.”

The carbon coating has not yet seen widespread commercial use because of difficulties in cheaply manufacturing carbon-coated materials. However, Erdemir said two unnamed companies are working to bring the coating process to an industrial scale. “The cost is the major issue,” he said. “In order to meet the cost requirements, you have to coat many thousands [of machinery parts] in one run.”

However, neutron choppers are not a large-volume application, and the additional cost of the specially coated components is acceptable given the potential improvements to the accuracy of neutron beam studies, Erdemir said. Furthermore, if the carbon coating proves durable in harsh vacuums, the technology could find broader applications, such as in vacuum pumps and spacecraft components.

The cooperative research program between Argonne and the Lesker Company will first test and optimize the carbon coating in vacuum conditions. Then researchers will devise a method to deposit the coating on critical moving parts of the neutron chopper device.

The cooperative research and development agreement is funded by a Phase I grant of the DOE Small Business Technology Transfer Program. Phase I funding, designated for preliminary studies, does not include plans to fabricate an actual device. If results from Phase I are promising, Phase II and III funding could be approved to develop and commercialize a product.

The Kurt J. Lesker Company is an international manufacturer and distributor of vacuum components and vacuum systems for research and industrial applications.

'Self-service' Benefits site debuts June 22

Changing and enrolling in Argonne's many benefit options will be easier with a new "self-service" format Web site making its debut June 22.

The new system will allow employees to view, change, enroll and cancel benefits.

"HR personnel will still be available to answer questions and solve problems, but most routine activities can be handled quickly and easily online," said Benefits Manager Rich Rons (HR).

Some of the features of the new Web site include:

Personal information, such as change of address and emergency contacts, can be changed online at any time.

Personalized benefits statements.

Health plan details such as the ability to add or delete dependents, view details of claim procedures and see links to health care provider Web sites.

The current elections and the ability to make changes to flexible spending accounts and life insurance programs.

A "two-track" system that presents different options for new hires and active employees. Employees new to the laboratory will see a checklist specific to each person, along with access to basic information on benefit enrollment and background information. The system will send e-mail reminders before important dates.

"We made this system as self-contained as possible," Rons said. "It's consistent and user-friendly."

Additional upgrades are in the works, Rons said. Retirement plan information, forms and links to providers are available, and employees will be able to change their deductions and allocations online. Employees will also be able to check time off, leave and sick leave balances.

Prostate test to be offered by Medical Dept.

Prostate screening will be held Wednesday, June 29, in Building 201 Medical Department.

Laurence Levine, M.D., board certified urologist, will offer digital prostate exams and review all results. The cost is $40; checks should be made payable to Laurence Levine, M.D.

For more information or to register, contact the Medical Department at ext. 2-2800.

Workshop brings petaflops computing a bit closer

Can the innovative Blue Gene/L architecture prove effective for a wide range of applications critical to U.S. Department of Energy research? And can important software libraries and tools, as well as scientific codes, be easily ported to the Blue Gene architecture?

These questions were addressed during a hands-on workshop held April 27-28 at Argonne's Mathematics and Computer Science Division. The 25 participants from two dozen institutions agreed that the workshop was a resounding success, with 16 codes ported, compiled and run with little difficulty.

Blue Gene's innovative design presents an exciting candidate for the first useful petaflops (quadrillions of floating-point operations per second) computer. The system offers powerful processors, multiple internal networks and outstanding balance in its performance of computation and communication. The system is highly scalable — to 64,000 nodes and beyond.

In early 2005, a one-rack Blue Gene/L system was installed at Argonne. The current configuration includes 2,048 compute processors and a peak performance of 5.7 teraflops. Since the machine's installation, Argonne systems staff have aggressively tested software and developed a scheduler for the system. Until recently, however, only a dozen applications had been run by "friendly users" from Argonne and the University of Chicago. The workshop was the first major test of the machine with a wide variety of applications, including nuclear physics, aerodynamics, quantum chromodynamics and nanophotonics.

The two-day workshop began with an introduction to the BG/L system: its processing unit, memory, and networking. This was followed by a review of the current applications that have been ported to the BG/L.

One early success has been a nuclear many-body calculation by researchers in Argonne's Physics Division. Using the BG/L for a total of about 150,000 processor hours, the researchers were able for the first time to compute the charge radius of the helium-6 isotope nucleus with an accuracy of one percent in comparison to a recent precision measurement.

The remainder of the workshop involved hands-on activities: porting applications, parallelizing parts of code and examining optimization strategies. Key to the workshop's success was the fact that users worked with individual advisors from Argonne, IBM and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

The response was uniformly positive. Participants who ran on the full 512-node system commented on the excellent scalability of the BG/L. Users also noted that the communication cost is fairly uniform as computations use more and more nodes, that the single-processor performance met expectations, and that the profiling tools and traceback utilities — while still relatively immature — are easy to use. The attendees left the workshop eager to get on Blue Gene systems available at other institutions or scheduled to be installed shortly.

In their evaluations of the system, the participants did offer several suggestions. For example, optimized versions of standard libraries, such as ScaLAPACK, still have to be added to avoid requiring users to rewrite part of their programs. Better documentation on settings, physical processor mapping and compiler settings also would be helpful. This feedback will be used as Argonne moves forward to thoroughly evaluate the Blue Gene/L for scientific computing. The goal is to enable computational scientists to simulate fundamental physical, chemical and biological processes that underlie the behavior of natural and engineered systems.

The applications workshop was sponsored by the Blue Gene/L Consortium, a group of laboratory and university research groups, led by Argonne, who are interested in the evaluation and early use of the Blue Gene family of high-performance systems. More information is online.

Computation for economics

topic of institute

Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago will host a five-day Institute on Computational Economics (ICE) July 18-22. Economic models are vital for policy analysis, but they often are based on ad hoc methods with poorly understood properties. The aim of this institute is to increase the use of state-of-the-art numerical methods and computer technology in economics models.

Each morning will consist of tutorials on new analytical and computational methods in such areas as dynamic programming, stochastic modeling, statistical computing and optimization problems with equilibrium constraints. Seminars will cover recent advances in quantitative economic policy research.

Afternoon sessions will include software presentations and hands-on workshops in which participants will apply the new software techniques to substantive applications. A committee of experts from Argonne and the University of Chicago has assembled leading scholars in economics, computational sciences, and applied mathematics to conduct the sessions.

The schedule can be found online.

More than 50 fellows have been selected to attend the workshop. The fellows are graduate students, postdoctoral researchers and junior faculty from economics departments in the United States and Europe. The fellows receive a generous stipend from the University of Chicago. Argonne scientists interested in attending all or part of the workshop should contact the organizers at i ce05@mcs.anl.gov by July 1.

Retirees

Rose L. Lorenz (OCF-PRO) retired May 27 with 27 years of service.

James Minich (CIS) retired May 18 with 15 years of service.

Istvan (Steve) Naday (HEP) retired May 16 with 17 years of service.

Connie Rekar (OCF) retired May 18 with 10 years of service.

Ronald Whitefield (DIS) retired May 31 with 27 years of service.

Grads' health coverage can be extended

Under Argonne's health care plans, graduating students ages 20 to 23 who are not continuing as full-time students lose their dependent health care coverage at the end of the month in which they graduate.

These students are eligible for continuation of coverage under COBRA if Human Resources-Benefits is notified within 30 days of graduation. Failure to report the graduation in that time will result in personal liability for ineligible health care costs and a loss of health insurance continuation rights that are available under COBRA.

Employees should send written notification that includes the date of graduation, employee badge number, name and address of dependent to Fran Perri (HR) in Building 201 or e-mail fperri@anl.gov.

250 tons of paper recycled in 1st quarter

Argonne has recycled nearly 250 tons of office paper from January through April 2005, saving 1.75 million pounds of virgin fiber.

Gregg Kulma (EQO), the laboratory's Waste Minimization/Pollution Prevention Coordinator, hopes that lab employees can continue to improve these efforts. Kulma suggested printing on both sides of paper by using the duplex function on office printers and copiers to cut down paper use.

Efforts to reduce paper use helps Argonne meet performance measures under the Department of Energy contract. Argonne is required to reduce waste generation for routine waste streams, including PCBs, hazardous, radioactive and sanitary wastes. Since January 2005, the lab has reduced the volumes of these waste streams by amounts ranging from two to 50 percent.

Ideas and suggestions about waste reduction at Argonne can be sent to Kulma at ext. 2-9147 or gkulma@anl.gov.