Argonne National Laboratory in the context of "Idaho National Laboratory"

The University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (UChicago PME) is the first school of an engineering discipline at the University of Chicago. It was founded as the Institute for Molecular Engineering in 2011 by the university in partnership with Argonne National Laboratory. When the program was raised to the status of a school in 2019, it became the first school dedicated to molecular engineering in the United States. It is named for a major benefactor, the Pritzker Foundation.

The scientists, engineers, and students at PME use scientific research to pursue engineering solutions to some of humanity's biggest challenges. The school does not have departments. Instead, it organizes its research around interdisciplinary “themes”: immuno-engineering, quantum engineering, and energy and sustainability. PME works toward technological advancements in areas of global importance, including sustainable energy and natural resources, immunotherapy-based approaches to cancer, “unhackable” communications networks, and a clean global water supply. The school plans to expand its research areas to address more issues of global importance.

A supercomputer is a type of computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. Supercomputers play an important role in the field of computational science, and are used for a wide range of computationally intensive tasks in various fields including quantum mechanics, weather forecasting, climate research, oil and gas exploration, molecular modeling (computing the structures and properties of chemical compounds, biological macromolecules, polymers, and crystals), and physical simulations (such as simulations of aerodynamics, of the early moments of the universe, and of nuclear weapons). They have been essential in the field of cryptanalysis.

The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instructions per second (MIPS). Since 2022, exascale supercomputers have existed which can perform over 10 FLOPS. For comparison, a desktop computer has performance in the range of hundreds of gigaFLOPS (10) to tens of teraFLOPS (10). Since November 2017, all of the world's fastest 500 supercomputers run on Linux-based operating systems. Additional research is being conducted in the United States, the European Union, Taiwan, Japan, and China to build faster, more powerful and technologically superior exascale supercomputers.

The Metallurgical Laboratory (or Met Lab) was a scientific laboratory from 1942 to 1946 at the University of Chicago. It was established in February 1942 and became the Argonne National Laboratory in July 1946.

The laboratory was established in February 1942 to study and use the newly discovered chemical element plutonium. It researched plutonium's chemistry and metallurgy, designed the world's first nuclear reactors to produce it, and developed chemical processes to separate it from other elements. In August 1942 the lab's chemical section was the first to chemically separate a weighable sample of plutonium, and on 2 December 1942, the Met Lab produced the first controlled nuclear chain reaction, in the reactor Chicago Pile-1, which was constructed under the stands of the university's old football stadium, Stagg Field.

Walter Henry Zinn (December 10, 1906 – February 14, 2000) was a Canadian-born American nuclear physicist who was the first director of the Argonne National Laboratory from 1946 to 1956. He worked at the Manhattan Project's Metallurgical Laboratory during World War II, and supervised the construction of Chicago Pile-1, the world's first nuclear reactor, which went critical on December 2, 1942, at the University of Chicago. At Argonne he designed and built several new reactors, including Experimental Breeder Reactor I, the first nuclear reactor to electrically power a building, which went live on December 20, 1951.

Laboratory flasks are vessels or containers that fall into the category of laboratory equipment known as glassware. In laboratory and other scientific settings, they are usually referred to simply as flasks. Flasks come in a number of shapes and a wide range of sizes, but a common distinguishing aspect in their shapes is a wider vessel "body" and one (or sometimes more) narrower tubular sections at the top called necks which have an opening at the top. Laboratory flask sizes are specified by the volume they can hold, typically in SI units such as milliliters (mL or ml) or liters (L or l). Laboratory flasks have traditionally been made of glass, but can also be made of plastic.

At the opening(s) at top of the neck of some glass flasks such as round-bottom flasks, retorts, or sometimes volumetric flasks, there are outer (or female) tapered (conical) ground glass joints. Some flasks, especially volumetric flasks, come with a laboratory rubber stopper, bung, or cap for capping the opening at the top of the neck. Such stoppers can be made of glass or plastic. Glass stoppers typically have a matching tapered inner (or male) ground glass joint surface, but often only of stopper quality. Flasks which do not come with such stoppers or caps included may be capped with a rubber bung or cork stopper.

AMPL (A Mathematical Programming Language) is an algebraic modeling language to describe and solve high-complexity problems for large-scale mathematical computing (e.g. large-scale optimization and scheduling-type problems).It was developed by Robert Fourer, David Gay, and Brian Kernighan at Bell Laboratories.AMPL supports dozens of solvers, both open source and commercial software, including CBC, CPLEX, FortMP, MOSEK, MINOS, IPOPT, SNOPT, KNITRO, and LGO. Problems are passed to solvers as nl files.AMPL is used by more than 100 corporate clients, and by government agencies and academic institutions.

One advantage of AMPL is the similarity of its syntax to the mathematical notation of optimization problems. This allows for a very concise and readable definition of problems in the domain of optimization. Many modern solvers available on the NEOS Server (formerly hosted at the Argonne National Laboratory, currently hosted at the University of Wisconsin, Madison) accept AMPL input. According to the NEOS statistics AMPL is the most popular format for representing mathematical programming problems.