The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory is ready to launch powerful new capabilities at two of its DOE Office of Science national user facilities. The dynamic combination of tools has the power to transform scientific research. One is an upgraded Advanced Photon Source, or APS, which is one of the brightest X-ray light sources in the world. The other is Aurora at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF), which is an exascale supercomputer capable of performing over 1 quintillion (1 billion billion) calculations per second.

Together, these tools will empower scientists to make discoveries at unprecedented speeds.

Here, we highlight people — two from APS and two from ALCF — whose work is making a difference at Argonne. They are just a few of the many diverse and interesting humans behind two impressively powerful machines.

Katie Martin: Project manager keeps a close eye on APS Upgrade

As a project controls manager for Argonne, Katie Martin’s job is to manage the cost and schedule for long-term construction and science projects, working with the scientists and engineers to keep things on time and within budget. Some of these projects can span years and cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and Martin keeps track of every day and every dime.

Martin began working as an administrative assistant at Argonne in 2007, as part of a co-op program in high school. She stayed with the Laboratory and worked full time while attending DeVry University part time. Argonne provided financial assistance for her college education.

“The Lab invested in me,” she said. ​“That is really encouraging and has kept me motivated. I was taking 20 credit hours a semester, juggling classes and full-time work. They saw potential in me and helped to ensure that I could attend classes to further develop myself professionally, becoming a more valuable asset to the Lab in the process.”

For most of that time Martin has been working in the Project Management Office, which serves as a conduit between project teams and the DOE. As part of this team, Martin has worked on several construction projects at the Laboratory, including the Energy Sciences Building and the Advanced Protein Characterization Facility, and a massive ongoing upgrade of the APS.

The APS Upgrade project included replacing the existing particle accelerator at the heart of the facility with a state-of-the-art model, one that will increase the brightness of the X-ray beams by up to 500 times. New research stations are under construction and existing stations are being modified or enhanced to make use of the new high-brightness light source. With a projected cost of $815 million and a year-long installation period required for the new accelerator, the APS Upgrade has a lot of moving parts. Martin’s job is to keep her eye on each one of them.

The APS Upgrade is the largest and most complicated project Martin has been a part of and she is proud to have played a part in a project that she knows will lead to positive changes in the world, from new energy storage devices to new treatments and vaccines for diseases.

“It is the most exciting project I have worked on,” she said. ​“The APS Upgrade will directly impact the future of science in our country and around the world, and everyone realizes that. Having the opportunity to work with these scientists and engineers, some of the best in the world, has been and continues to be a privilege.” 

Thomas Applencourt: Compiling algorithms into instructions for Aurora

Originally from Réunion Island, a very small French territory near the Indian Ocean coast of Madagascar, Thomas Applencourt grew up hearing and speaking an equal blend of French and Créole, a rich blend of languages that — on Réunion — includes Indian, Chinese, French, Madagascar’s Malgasy and more.

“It’s a little like native slang,” said Applencourt, who traveled to mainland France to earn a bachelor’s degree in fundamental physics and a master’s and doctoral degrees in computational science and quantum chemistry before joining Argonne in 2018. ​“If you spend long enough on Réunion or you grew up there, you probably speak some Créole with your friends.”

Navigating languages is a decided strength for Applencourt. He has been integral to developing a new Intel compiler that helps optimize codes and maximize performance on Aurora’s central processing units (CPUs) and graphics processing units (GPUs). A compiler is a software tool that transforms algorithms written in high-level programming languages into machine-readable code that can be executed efficiently on the system’s hardware.

His aim, he said, is to bridge the gap between hardware and software, between vendors and users. When an early compiler of his worked, for example, he said he felt proud that he and his colleagues were able to help people who may not have even realized part of the machine was broken. ​“They may think it just worked,” he said.

Outside of his contributions to Aurora, Applencourt enjoys the decorative artistry, tiny mechanical teeth and simple concrete movements of watches. He aspires to own a fine pocket watch that celebrates U.S. history. However, he continues to turn an ear to the world of zeroes and ones.

“I really like working on this interface between computer and computer,” he said, quoting Arthur C. Clarke (“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”). ​“It’s what I like about Argonne, too; there are lots of diverse people coming from different backgrounds or places and you need to learn both sides of a thing. That’s the interface of things. I like that a lot.”

Ashley Wayman: Liaison between beamline staff and the rest of an upgraded APS

Hundreds of people work at the APS and more than 5,500 scientists run experiments in a typical year using the facility’s bright X-ray beams.

To keep everyone connected, floor coordinators such as Ashley Wayman act as a liaison between the beamline crews and the rest of the staff at the APS. Wayman, who has a background in chemistry, joined Argonne in 2019. She first started out in food science research at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, followed by quality control and quality assurance for a food ingredient manufacturer. Eventually, Wayman realized she missed working in a research environment and applied for a job at the APS.

She is now one of eight floor coordinators who cover the 35 experiment sectors around the APS floor. The floor coordinator manages numerous tasks, from providing final authorization on all experiments and making sure work is approved to solving any issues that arise.

“I like being helpful. It is very satisfying to have a researcher come to you with a problem and be able to connect them to the right person so they can continue to focus on the science,” said Wayman.

Floor coordinators are great resources who serve as a point of contact and help with planning, coordination, approvals and permits. A major focus for floor coordinators is managing configuration control for the Radiation Safety Systems (RSS) components for the experiment floor and front-end systems of the beamlines.

Any work on RSS components requires a special permit that details the scope of work, references approvals and indicates what the safe state needs to be in order for work to begin. After a major upgrade of the APS storage ring, which will result in X-ray beams that are up to 500 times brighter than they were before, Wayman will transition to helping with the beamline commissioning process. This ensures that beamlines are safe and ready for use by researchers. After that, she will return to normal operations and continue to help support the scientists who make meaningful discoveries.

“I’m excited to do my part to enable the incredible discoveries that will come out of Argonne and the upgraded APS,” said Wayman.

Servesh Muralidharan: Paving the way to high-impact research

Enhanced computer architectures empower researchers to build the next generation of supercomputers that are faster at solving complex scientific problems. This is one reason why computer scientist Servesh Muralidharan is motivated to do the work he does on Aurora.

Before Aurora, Muralidharan led efforts to bring up and maintain early hardware that allowed researchers to test and prepare codes ahead of the system’s deployment. His current work is focused on identifying and debugging hardware- and software-related issues to ensure Aurora runs smoothly and reliably for the scientific community. These efforts are paving the way to high-impact research in areas ranging from pharmaceutical drug discovery to the development and training of artificial intelligence (AI) models for science.

“Many recent societal advances are possible because we have access to large amounts of computing resources to train vast amounts of data,” Muralidharan said. ​“Aurora as a production resource will lead to the capability to train many such models in different scientific domains.”

Recently, Muralidharan played a significant role in readying Aurora for key benchmarks that measure the performance of supercomputers. Working with collaborators at Intel, his efforts helped Aurora break the exascale barrier and achieve the status of the world’s fastest supercomputer for AI workloads.

Originally from Chennai, India, Muralidharan has been with Argonne since late 2019. His path to Argonne wasn’t immediate. He attended college and worked initially for IBM in India before moving to Ireland to earn his doctorate and complete his post-doctoral work. He then moved to Switzerland for a fellowship at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. It was a long (and a little lonely) path for him, but he knew it would be worth it.

“It was my dream for a very long time to work on a large-scale computer,” he said. ​“That was what brought me to Aurora. I knew I wanted to do something that occupied me in that intellectual sense.”

He arrived at Argonne mere months before the COVID-19 pandemic but still managed to adapt to his new role. He also happily connected with a woman also from Chennai. They married in India in 2021, despite the travel worries of the time.

“I have gained a broad set of experiences and learned a lot,” he said in reflection. ​“Hopefully, my work will translate into actual things that help the scientific community achieve better results and eventually transform our lives. I hope the effect of the small things I do will be quite large in the longer duration of time.”

The Argonne Leadership Computing Facility provides supercomputing capabilities to the scientific and engineering community to advance fundamental discovery and understanding in a broad range of disciplines. Supported by the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Office of Science, Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) program, the ALCF is one of two DOE Leadership Computing Facilities in the nation dedicated to open science.

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.

This research used resources of the Advanced Photon Source, a U.S. DOE Office of Science User Facility operated for the DOE Office of Science by Argonne National Laboratory under Contract No. DE-AC02-06CH11357.

Argonne National Laboratory seeks solutions to pressing national problems in science and technology by conducting leading-edge basic and applied research in virtually every scientific discipline. Argonne is managed by UChicago Argonne, LLC for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit https://​ener​gy​.gov/​s​c​ience.