After 40 years of participating in landmark science, the Department of Energy’s Office of Science is celebrating DoE’s four decades with trip a down memory lane. DoE has just posted bite-size chunks of many of its achievements to mark the milestone.
“To celebrate the Department of Energy’s 40th anniversary, the Office of Science has collected 40 major papers from the past 40 years that we’ve supported via research through our National Laboratories, user facilities, and grants programs,” reports DoE.
The image on the side here recalls a 1988 paper. “In October 1986, the “information highway” had the first of what was to be a series of traffic jams. These crashes stopped people from retrieving email, accessing data or viewing websites. How could these collapses be avoided? This landmark 1988 paper described and analyzed five algorithms that shed light on the flow of data packets. In addition, the paper detailed how to tune the Berkeley Unix Transmission Control Protocol, which enabled systems to connect and exchange data streams under abysmal network conditions. This paper laid out the foundations for controlling and avoiding congestion in the Internet.”
A little chest-thumping is probably called for. Impressive work, ranging from extensive investigation into quarks and Tokmak plasma confinement to development of an early high performance storage system (HPSS) and the CHARMM computational microscope are all on the list.
Here’s the link to DoE’s poster-like presentations of notable papers: https://science.energy.gov/news/doe-science-at-40/