Rachel McDowell

Marketing & Communications Coordinator at Leidos

Knoxville, TN

Rachel McDowell

Marketing & Communications Coordinator at Leidos

Knoxville, TN

OLCF’s Advanced Technologies Section Hosts Seminar Series
The new seminar, open to ORNL staff members and beyond, includes topics such as technologies, science outcomes, and vendor tools. The Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility’s (OLCF’s) Advanced Technologies Section (ATS) is hosting a series of seminars on topics relevant to its section groups and beyond.
Events
Virtual Workshop on HPCToolkit Profiler Gives Computational Codes a Boost
OLCF, NERSC host workshop on HPCToolkit to help computational users better understand their codes. When users of the US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) supercomputers want to improve their scientific codes, they employ tools called profilers that determine which pieces of their codes are lacking in performance.
Events
UT–ORNL Data Center Course Takes Students on a Virtual Ride through ORNL’s Supercomputing Facilities
Students get a taste of ORNL’s large-scale data centers with online tours and virtual lectures from UT and ORNL staff. What does it take to manage a robust data center? And how can engineers get the experience needed to oversee both the facilities—the power, cooling, and electrical components—and the computing aspects, such as hardware and performance?
Events
ORNL Staff Highlight OpenACC’s Role in HPC at Annual Meeting
Talks by OLCF staff members emphasize the need for mature programming standards. OpenMP and OpenACC are widely used directive-based application program interfaces (APIs) that allow computer scientists and engineers to program applications on shared memory and accelerator architectures on high-performance computing (HPC) systems.
Events
OLCF Staff Involved in Khronos Effort to Create New Visualization Standard
Exploratory group seeks to develop common application programming interface for more efficient visualization. To those outside the high-performance computing community, supercomputers are a mysterious breed. Rows of refrigerator-sized cabinets span the length of an entire room, connected in an ensemble of fiber-optic cables and networking equipment.
Events
Record-Breaking Year for OLCF GPU Hackathons Ends with Annual Knoxville, Tennessee, Event
The OLCF’s fifth year hosting hackathons brings new opportunities, growth. Attendees from national laboratories, universities, and industry participated in the hackathon, held October 21–25. It was the 11th such event cohosted by the OLCF and NVIDIA in 2019—the most ever held in a single year by the institutions.
Events
Second “Introduce Your Daughter to AI” Event Is a Hit
Women in Computing networking group hosts another successful event for ORNL staffers and daughters. The Women in Computing (WiC) networking group at the US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) hosted its second “Introduce Your Daughter to AI” workshop on June 7. With 31 ORNL employees attending with their daughters ages 12 to 17, this year’s event topped last year’s attendance mark for a total of 62 participants.
Events
ORNL Staff Plug into Tech Day
Department of Labor’s second annual technology event features ORNL researchers. Last month, the US Department of Labor’s (DOL’s) Tech Day 2019 put federal agencies’ emerging technologies on display for the public, highlighting developments in 3D printing, cybersecurity, virtual reality, and more. Researchers from the US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) were among the participants in the second annual all-day expo in Washington, DC, on May 16.
Events
OLCF Staff Participate in Merged Conferences for New Perspectives
Staff from the Computer Science Research Group travel to colocated conferences to facilitate development goals. The advent of new computing architectures brings the need for scalable and performance portable programming, and coordinated development of these programming models can maximize their efficiency and performance so they can exploit the parallelism available across and within compute nodes.
Events
OLCF Scientist Talks Early Summit Results at APS Meeting
Bronson Messer presents new supernova simulations at physics conference. Bronson Messer, a computational scientist at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), gave an invited talk at the American Physical Society’s (APS’s) “Quarks to the Cosmos” April meeting in Denver, detailing his current work on the OLCF’s 200-petaflop IBM AC922 Summit supercomputer.
Events
ORNL Security Teams Prepare to Take the Heat with Cyber Fire
LANL experts train East Tennessee cybersecurity researchers in large-scale simulation event. The high-performance computing (HPC) cybersecurity engineers at the US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) typically face small cybersecurity incidents, so they don’t often get a chance to respond to bigger events.
Events
UT Students Get Bite-Sized Bits of Big Data Centers in ORNL-Led Course
This fall, staff at the US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) once again contributed to the “Introduction to Data Centers” course at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UT). Now in its fourth year, the class had the largest and most diverse enrollment yet, with four disciplines represented: computer engineering, computer science, electrical engineering, and industrial engineering.
Events
Introduce Your Daughter to AI Event Sees OLCF Participation
Women’s networking group at ORNL hosts machine learning and AI event for staff and their daughters. After hosting two consecutive “Introduce Your Daughter to Code” events in 2016 and 2017, WiC sought to spotlight the growing fields of machine learning and AI with a novel event for daughters of ORNL staff members ranging in ages from 10 to 18.
Events
OLCF Readies Users for Summit
Staff to host multiple Summit-related training events in coming months. Now that the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) has launched its IBM AC922 Summit supercomputer, staff members in the OLCF’s User Assistance and Outreach (UAO) Group are planning robust training events intended to enhance user experiences on the new system.
Events
OLCF Hosts 14th Annual User Meeting amid Summit Buzz
Users recount accomplishments on Titan while looking toward future systems. Some presentations during the meeting recognized achievements on the current Cray XK7 Titan supercomputer, and others homed in on the potential 200-petaflop IBM AC922 Summit. Staff also introduced the timeline for the OLCF’s future exascale supercomputer, Frontier.
Events
Teams Gear up for Summit at Fourth Annual GPU Hackathon
Ten teams work to scale their codes on Summitdev at yearly OLCF event. At the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility’s (OLCF’s) fourth annual GPU Hackathon, event programmers again successfully adapted their applications for GPU architectures. The 5-day event at the Hilton in Knoxville, Tennessee, took place the week of October 9 during the installation of the OLCF’s next flagship supercomputer, Summit.
Events

About

Rachel McDowell

While studying psychology and technical communication at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, I developed a passion for unraveling the intricacies of the human brain and its mechanisms. This curiosity in neuroscience and neuropharmacology steered me towards a role as a Certified Pharmacy Technician, where I fostered a deep appreciation for science and healthcare. My enthusiasm for learning and science, combined with my aptitude for written communication, initially drove me toward science writing.

Previously, as a science communicator, I crafted engaging and compelling narratives that showcased the cutting-edge scientific advancements, resources, tools, and expertise at the US Department of Energy's Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF). In 2018, I spearheaded communication strategies for the launch of the nation's most powerful supercomputer for open science and created versatile content for the imminent launch of the world's first exascale supercomputer, Frontier.

After dedicating six years to supercomputing, I returned to my healthcare roots and took on the role of Copywriter at MDClone. There, I authored blog posts, press releases, case studies, and use cases, illustrating the life-changing impact of MDClone's digital analytics platform on patients.

I am now on an adventure as a Senior Analyst (Medical Writer) at Avalere Health, and I am loving this chapter of my writing and editing career. I currently write and edit persuasive global payer value messaging materials, encompassing global value dossiers, payer value propositions, and objection handlers as a key member of Avalere Health’s Global Patient Access Strategy & Commercialization practice in the Policy, Access, Value and Evidence capability.

Among the various hobbies I enjoy, you can frequently find me dancing (salsa and other styles), engaging in creative pursuits, hiking my favorite East Tennessee trails (Clingmans Dome and Abrams Falls), or stretching out on my yoga mat.