UTK visit day 2

Today was full of tours. In the morning we were shown select parts of the (extremely large) Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Their Spallation Neutron Source was offline for maintenance, so we were able to visit the facility. A beam of neutrons produced by hitting mercury with accelerated protons powers many different lab instruments.

Part of the top floor of the SNS

We then saw the Summit supercomputing facility, which provides a huge amount of computing power mostly in the form of GPUs. The sentence "we're installing a 40 megawatt line" was spoken. We visited several labs, both at ORNL and the University itself. UTK has a large focus on agriculture even in the Genome Science & Technology program, so they have sophisticated greenhouse facilities.

At dinner we were joined by some GST faculty. Tomorrow we'll have the official interviews.