John Turner

Advanced Modeling & Simulation For Enhanced Energy Security
– Nuclear Power and Energy Storage

Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL)
Computer Science & Mathematics Division (CSMD)
Computational Engineering & Energy Sciences Group

John Turner is the Group Leader of the Computational Engineering & Energy Sciences Group at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL).  Upon completion of a Ph.D. in Nuclear Engineering from North Carolina State University, John accepted a staff position at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in 1990, where he worked in the areas of space nuclear power, deterministic radiation transport methods & code development, numerical linear algebra, and metal casting simulation. 

In 1997 John left LANL to join Blue Sky Studios, a computer animation company outside New York City, where he contributed to the proprietary ray-tracing renderer used to generate images for film and video, and developed other tools used in productions such as the Oscar-winning short animated film “Bunny” and the Academy Award-nominated feature film “Ice Age”.

In 2001 John returned to LANL, and in 2004 became Group Leader of the Computational Physics Group (CCS-2), leading a diverse collection of physicists, engineers, applied mathematicians, and computer scientists conducting research in modeling & simulation of physical processes such as fluid dynamics & radiation transport for applications ranging from ocean & climate modeling to numerical methods & code development for nuclear weapons and nuclear energy systems.  During this period Dr. Turner was also active in efforts to investigate emerging computing architectures such as the Roadrunner supercomputer, which uses enhanced versions the processor used in the PlayStation 3 video game console, in conjunction with an Opteron-based Linux cluster to achieve a sustained performance exceeding 1 PetaFlop/s.  John led the Advanced Algorithms and Applications team, tasked with ensuring that Roadrunner achieves high performance not just on synthetic benchmarks but on applications of scientific and programmatic interest to LANL.

In August of 2008, Dr. Turner moved to ORNL to form a new group, Computational Engineering and Energy Sciences, focused on building simulation tools to bring the advances in large-scale, high-performance computing to bear on applications of national interest such as nuclear energy and energy storage systems.