Argonne National Laboratory - User Facilities

User Facilities

Argonne builds and maintains scientific facilities that would be too expensive for a single company or university to construct and operate. These facilities are used by scientists from Argonne, private industry, academia, other national laboratories and international scientific organizations.

• Advanced Photon Source (APS) – a national synchrotron X-ray research facility which produces the brightest X-ray beams in the Western Hemisphere.

• Center for Nanoscale Materials (CNM) – a user facility located on the APS which provides infrastructure and instruments to study nanotechnology and nanomaterials. The CNM is one of five U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science Nanoscale Science Research Centers.

• Argonne Tandem Linac Accelerator System (ATLAS) – ATLAS is the world's first superconducting particle accelerator for heavy ions at energies in the vicinity of the Coulomb barrier. This is the energy domain suited to study the properties of the nucleus, the core of matter and the fuel of stars.

• Electron Microscopy Center (EMC) – one of three DOE-supported scientific user facilities for electron beam microcharacterization. The EMC conducts in situ studies of transformations and defect processes, ion beam modification and irradiation effects, superconductors, ferroelectrics and interfaces. Its intermediate voltage electron microscope, which is coupled with an accelerator, represents the only such system in the United States.

• Argonne Leadership Computing Facility – Provides leadership-class computing resources, including computer time, resources and data storage, to the scientific community. Argonne is home to Intrepid, an IBM Blue Gene/P supercomputer, recently ranked the second most energy-efficient supercomputer of its class by Green500 and ranked the eighth-fastest supercomputer worldwide.

• Structural Biology Center (SBC) – The SBC is a user facility located off the Advanced Photon Source X-ray facility, which specializes in macromolecular crystallography. Users have access to an insertion-device, a bending-magnet, and a biochemistry laboratory. SBC beamlines are often used to map out the crystal structures of proteins; in the past, users have imaged proteins from anthrax, meningitis-causing bacteria, salmonella, and other pathogenic bacteria.

• Transportation Research & Analysis Computing Center (TRACC) – a facility which uses high-performance computing to analyze and create data and visual models for a variety of transportation issues, including crashworthiness, aerodynamics, combustion, thermal management, weather modeling and traffic simulation.

• Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Climate Research Facility (ARM) – Argonne is one of nine national laboratories which contribute to the ARM program, designed to research global climate change. Argonne oversees ARM operations and manages a meteorological data-gathering site in Oklahoma and a mobile data-gathering facility.

• The Network Enabled Optimization System (NEOS) Server is the first network-enabled problem-solving environment for a wide class of applications in business, science, and engineering. Included are state-of-the-art solvers in integer programming, nonlinear optimization, linear programming, stochastic programming, and complemetarity problems. Most NEOS solvers accept input in the AMPL modeling language.