Argonne Opens New APS Long Beamline Building

July 26, 2022

July 26, 2022 — Yesterday, U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm and several Illinois leaders cut a ceremonial ribbon to mark the completion of a new facility that will host new experiments that will contribute to the future of electric vehicles, quantum computers and resilient materials for all kinds of uses.

Pictured (L-R): Laurent Chapon, U.S. Rep. Bill Foster, Elmie Peoples-Evans, Secretary Granholm, State Sen. Diane Pappas, Jim Kerby, Argonne Laboratory Director Paul Kearns, DOE Office of Science ASO Deputy Manager Rock Aker, U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush, and State Sen. Sue Rezin. Credit: Argonne.

The newly constructed Long Beamline Building (LBB) at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory is an experiment hall that will become a part of the Advanced Photon Source (APS), a DOE Office of Science user facility. It will house two new beamlines that will transport ultrabright X-rays from the heart of the APS to cutting-edge scientific instruments.

This next generation of beamlines will be capable of providing high-resolution X-ray images of critical components and technologies from aircraft engines to solar cells to advanced materials for microelectronics, in clear detail and at impressively small scale.

The LBB is part of an $815 million upgrade of the APS, one of the most productive X-ray light sources in the world. More than 5,000 scientists from around the globe use the APS in a typical year to conduct research in fields ranging from chemistry to life sciences to materials science to geology.

“When America leads on science, we boost our global competitiveness and we create jobs. President Biden believes that investing in science and innovation helps us tackle not only today’s greatest challenges, but tomorrow’s as well,” said Secretary Granholm. ​“The newly unveiled facility at Argonne National Lab’s Advanced Photon Source is exactly what scientific leadership looks like and DOE could not be more proud of the scientists, researchers, staff and students who lead this important work.”

U.S. Reps. Bill Foster and Bobby Rush, Illinois State Sens. Diane Pappas and Sue Rezin, Argonne Laboratory Director Paul Kearns and dozens of scientists, engineers and APS team members joined Secretary Granholm for the occasion.

“As a particle physicist and a businessman, I am proud that this groundbreaking investment is happening here in Illinois at Argonne, our country’s first national laboratory,” said Congressman Foster. ​“The research that will be conducted here will be crucial as we work to develop everything from new energy technologies to solutions to pressing challenges like the opioid epidemic. This is just the beginning. I will continue to push for the sustained federal funding that will unlock the immense potential of the APS and Argonne’s other world-class research facilities.”

The APS Upgrade will replace the facility’s 25-year-old electron storage ring, an extremely large and powerful scientific instrument, with a state-of-the-art ring that will increase the brightness of the X-rays generated by up to 500 times. Several new beamlines will be constructed around the existing storage ring to facilitate a variety of research aims. The LBB will host two of them:

  • The In Situ Nanoprobe (ISN) will be used to create longer-lasting batteries and other energy storage devices, better functional materials and more powerful catalysts to reduce carbon emissions. Its ability to examine samples in different environmental conditions at ultrahigh spatial resolutions will be unmatched in the United States.
  • The High-Energy X-ray Microscope (HEXM) will offer extraordinary imaging capabilities for materials science, and will be used to, for example, improve the durability of materials used for airplane turbines, to prevent cracks and other defects from forming.

The Long Beamline Building project also includes the construction of the Activated Materials Laboratory (AML), funded by DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy. Adjacent to HEXM, the AML will allow the safe handling and storage of radioactive materials.

“It is imperative that scientists have the facilities and instruments they need to help us address climate change and answer the energy challenges that lie ahead,” said Congressman Rush. ​“With ingenuity and tenacity, a diverse set of engineers and scientists here in Illinois have taken an important step to providing a world-class resource that will improve the future of every American, wherever they live. I applaud their progress.”

As the name implies, the beamlines housed in the LBB are unusually long. In fact, they’re about three times longer than those currently at the APS, sending photons further from the source to reach samples being analyzed. This distance (roughly two football fields in length) allows for more focused X-ray beams and helps scientists look at materials and processes in much greater detail.

“The upgraded APS, paired with our advanced supercomputers, will offer scientists a powerful combination of tools to explore science at scale,” said Kearns. ​“We are thrilled to see the Long Beamline Building completed, which will help us push the boundaries of science and accelerate the technology that drives U.S. economic prosperity and security.”
The APS Upgrade team received full occupancy of the LBB in June 2022 — on time and on budget. Work is now underway to build experiment stations for the new beamlines inside the building.

The LBB, which broke ground for construction in June 2020, remains the most outwardly visible portion of the APS Upgrade project. To allow installation and commissioning of various components essential to the upgrade, the APS will pause operations for one year, starting in April 2023. When the light source returns in 2024 and experiments resume, the long beamlines in the LBB will be put to use immediately.

About the Advanced Photon Source

The U. S. Department of Energy Office of Science’s Advanced Photon Source (APS) at Argonne National Laboratory is one of the world’s most productive X-ray light source facilities. The APS provides high-brightness X-ray beams to a diverse community of researchers in materials science, chemistry, condensed matter physics, the life and environmental sciences, and applied research. These X-rays are ideally suited for explorations of materials and biological structures; elemental distribution; chemical, magnetic, electronic states; and a wide range of technologically important engineering systems from batteries to fuel injector sprays, all of which are the foundations of our nation’s economic, technological, and physical well-being. Each year, more than 5,000 researchers use the APS to produce over 2,000 publications detailing impactful discoveries, and solve more vital biological protein structures than users of any other X-ray light source research facility. APS scientists and engineers innovate technology that is at the heart of advancing accelerator and light-source operations. This includes the insertion devices that produce extreme-brightness X-rays prized by researchers, lenses that focus the X-rays down to a few nanometers, instrumentation that maximizes the way the X-rays interact with samples being studied, and software that gathers and manages the massive quantity of data resulting from discovery research at the APS.


Source: Kristen Molly Dean, Argonne National Laboratory

Subscribe to HPCwire's Weekly Update!

Be the most informed person in the room! Stay ahead of the tech trends with industry updates delivered to you every week!

MLPerf Inference 4.0 Results Showcase GenAI; Nvidia Still Dominates

March 28, 2024

There were no startling surprises in the latest MLPerf Inference benchmark (4.0) results released yesterday. Two new workloads — Llama 2 and Stable Diffusion XL — were added to the benchmark suite as MLPerf continues Read more…

Q&A with Nvidia’s Chief of DGX Systems on the DGX-GB200 Rack-scale System

March 27, 2024

Pictures of Nvidia's new flagship mega-server, the DGX GB200, on the GTC show floor got favorable reactions on social media for the sheer amount of computing power it brings to artificial intelligence.  Nvidia's DGX Read more…

Call for Participation in Workshop on Potential NSF CISE Quantum Initiative

March 26, 2024

Editor’s Note: Next month there will be a workshop to discuss what a quantum initiative led by NSF’s Computer, Information Science and Engineering (CISE) directorate could entail. The details are posted below in a Ca Read more…

Waseda U. Researchers Reports New Quantum Algorithm for Speeding Optimization

March 25, 2024

Optimization problems cover a wide range of applications and are often cited as good candidates for quantum computing. However, the execution time for constrained combinatorial optimization applications on quantum device Read more…

NVLink: Faster Interconnects and Switches to Help Relieve Data Bottlenecks

March 25, 2024

Nvidia’s new Blackwell architecture may have stolen the show this week at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California. But an emerging bottleneck at the network layer threatens to make bigger and brawnier pro Read more…

Who is David Blackwell?

March 22, 2024

During GTC24, co-founder and president of NVIDIA Jensen Huang unveiled the Blackwell GPU. This GPU itself is heavily optimized for AI work, boasting 192GB of HBM3E memory as well as the the ability to train 1 trillion pa Read more…

MLPerf Inference 4.0 Results Showcase GenAI; Nvidia Still Dominates

March 28, 2024

There were no startling surprises in the latest MLPerf Inference benchmark (4.0) results released yesterday. Two new workloads — Llama 2 and Stable Diffusion Read more…

Q&A with Nvidia’s Chief of DGX Systems on the DGX-GB200 Rack-scale System

March 27, 2024

Pictures of Nvidia's new flagship mega-server, the DGX GB200, on the GTC show floor got favorable reactions on social media for the sheer amount of computing po Read more…

NVLink: Faster Interconnects and Switches to Help Relieve Data Bottlenecks

March 25, 2024

Nvidia’s new Blackwell architecture may have stolen the show this week at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California. But an emerging bottleneck at Read more…

Who is David Blackwell?

March 22, 2024

During GTC24, co-founder and president of NVIDIA Jensen Huang unveiled the Blackwell GPU. This GPU itself is heavily optimized for AI work, boasting 192GB of HB Read more…

Nvidia Looks to Accelerate GenAI Adoption with NIM

March 19, 2024

Today at the GPU Technology Conference, Nvidia launched a new offering aimed at helping customers quickly deploy their generative AI applications in a secure, s Read more…

The Generative AI Future Is Now, Nvidia’s Huang Says

March 19, 2024

We are in the early days of a transformative shift in how business gets done thanks to the advent of generative AI, according to Nvidia CEO and cofounder Jensen Read more…

Nvidia’s New Blackwell GPU Can Train AI Models with Trillions of Parameters

March 18, 2024

Nvidia's latest and fastest GPU, codenamed Blackwell, is here and will underpin the company's AI plans this year. The chip offers performance improvements from Read more…

Nvidia Showcases Quantum Cloud, Expanding Quantum Portfolio at GTC24

March 18, 2024

Nvidia’s barrage of quantum news at GTC24 this week includes new products, signature collaborations, and a new Nvidia Quantum Cloud for quantum developers. Wh Read more…

Alibaba Shuts Down its Quantum Computing Effort

November 30, 2023

In case you missed it, China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba has shut down its quantum computing research effort. It’s not entirely clear what drove the change. Read more…

Nvidia H100: Are 550,000 GPUs Enough for This Year?

August 17, 2023

The GPU Squeeze continues to place a premium on Nvidia H100 GPUs. In a recent Financial Times article, Nvidia reports that it expects to ship 550,000 of its lat Read more…

Shutterstock 1285747942

AMD’s Horsepower-packed MI300X GPU Beats Nvidia’s Upcoming H200

December 7, 2023

AMD and Nvidia are locked in an AI performance battle – much like the gaming GPU performance clash the companies have waged for decades. AMD has claimed it Read more…

DoD Takes a Long View of Quantum Computing

December 19, 2023

Given the large sums tied to expensive weapon systems – think $100-million-plus per F-35 fighter – it’s easy to forget the U.S. Department of Defense is a Read more…

Synopsys Eats Ansys: Does HPC Get Indigestion?

February 8, 2024

Recently, it was announced that Synopsys is buying HPC tool developer Ansys. Started in Pittsburgh, Pa., in 1970 as Swanson Analysis Systems, Inc. (SASI) by John Swanson (and eventually renamed), Ansys serves the CAE (Computer Aided Engineering)/multiphysics engineering simulation market. Read more…

Choosing the Right GPU for LLM Inference and Training

December 11, 2023

Accelerating the training and inference processes of deep learning models is crucial for unleashing their true potential and NVIDIA GPUs have emerged as a game- Read more…

Intel’s Server and PC Chip Development Will Blur After 2025

January 15, 2024

Intel's dealing with much more than chip rivals breathing down its neck; it is simultaneously integrating a bevy of new technologies such as chiplets, artificia Read more…

Baidu Exits Quantum, Closely Following Alibaba’s Earlier Move

January 5, 2024

Reuters reported this week that Baidu, China’s giant e-commerce and services provider, is exiting the quantum computing development arena. Reuters reported � Read more…

Leading Solution Providers

Contributors

Comparing NVIDIA A100 and NVIDIA L40S: Which GPU is Ideal for AI and Graphics-Intensive Workloads?

October 30, 2023

With long lead times for the NVIDIA H100 and A100 GPUs, many organizations are looking at the new NVIDIA L40S GPU, which it’s a new GPU optimized for AI and g Read more…

Shutterstock 1179408610

Google Addresses the Mysteries of Its Hypercomputer 

December 28, 2023

When Google launched its Hypercomputer earlier this month (December 2023), the first reaction was, "Say what?" It turns out that the Hypercomputer is Google's t Read more…

AMD MI3000A

How AMD May Get Across the CUDA Moat

October 5, 2023

When discussing GenAI, the term "GPU" almost always enters the conversation and the topic often moves toward performance and access. Interestingly, the word "GPU" is assumed to mean "Nvidia" products. (As an aside, the popular Nvidia hardware used in GenAI are not technically... Read more…

Shutterstock 1606064203

Meta’s Zuckerberg Puts Its AI Future in the Hands of 600,000 GPUs

January 25, 2024

In under two minutes, Meta's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, laid out the company's AI plans, which included a plan to build an artificial intelligence system with the eq Read more…

Google Introduces ‘Hypercomputer’ to Its AI Infrastructure

December 11, 2023

Google ran out of monikers to describe its new AI system released on December 7. Supercomputer perhaps wasn't an apt description, so it settled on Hypercomputer Read more…

China Is All In on a RISC-V Future

January 8, 2024

The state of RISC-V in China was discussed in a recent report released by the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. The report, entitled "E Read more…

Intel Won’t Have a Xeon Max Chip with New Emerald Rapids CPU

December 14, 2023

As expected, Intel officially announced its 5th generation Xeon server chips codenamed Emerald Rapids at an event in New York City, where the focus was really o Read more…

IBM Quantum Summit: Two New QPUs, Upgraded Qiskit, 10-year Roadmap and More

December 4, 2023

IBM kicks off its annual Quantum Summit today and will announce a broad range of advances including its much-anticipated 1121-qubit Condor QPU, a smaller 133-qu Read more…

  • arrow
  • Click Here for More Headlines
  • arrow
HPCwire