For the sixth time in the last seven years and seventh time overall, UT-ORNL Governor’s Chair Professor for Power Grids Yilu Liu has won an R&D 100 Award, considered the most prestigious worldwide science and innovation prize recognizing new commercial products, technologies, and materials for their technological significance that are available for sale or license.
Liu’s most recent R&D 100 award recognizes the Pulsar-based Timing System, which converts naturally occurring pulsar signals into a high-integrity, coordinated universal time (UTC)-traceable timing source for critical infrastructure like power systems, data centers, finance, and telecommunications.
The R&D 100 Award winners were selected from 149 finalists across six categories.
“It feels good because the National Science Foundation (NSF) and Department of Energy (DOE) provided so much funding for CURENT as an engineering research center at the University of Tennessee,” Liu said. “It can take many years for technology to flourish and have the right timing for what society needs. I am very happy that it could all come together again.”
The Pulsar-based Timing System operates by receiving naturally occurring pulsar signals, extracting their highly regular pulse signatures, and converting those observations into a stable time reference for synchronization applications. Unlike conventional timing solutions that rely primarily on external man-made systems, this approach uses celestial radio sources as an independent basis for timekeeping.
By providing a more resilient alternative to global navigation satellite system (GNSS)-based timing, which uses signals from satellite constellations, the Pulsar-based system supports synchronization-sensitive applications with demonstrated holdover capability, distributed timing delivery, and compatibility with timing critical networks.
“There are neutral stars in the cosmos and typically they oscillate or rotate at a very fixed speed, so they act like a little tick that is very precise–many times more precise than GPS (Global Positioning System),” Liu said. “GPS constellations are subject to cosmic solar flares or malicious attacks or accidental attacks. This system can protect our precise timing and be a good backup that’s not easily physically attackable and remove the timing source from any society that’s using it.”
The system represents a bold attempt to rethink how critical infrastructure keeps time. As modern infrastructure becomes increasingly dependent on ultra-precise synchronization, the limitations of conventional satellite-based timing are becoming harder to ignore. Most current synchronization-critical applications rely heavily on GPS and other GNSS platforms, which are highly effective under normal conditions but are vulnerable to physical disruptions.
The R&D 100 award ceremony is scheduled for November 19, at the Grant Hyatt Scottsdale Resort in Scottsdale, Arizona. As she does every year, Liu plans to send a student to the award ceremony to accept the honor.
“The students are always eager to go and it’s such a memorable event for them,” Liu said. “I get other opportunities, so I want them to have a chance to experience something like this.”
Dongarra, Sandia National Laboratory honored
Emeritus Professor and University Distinguished Professor of Computer Science Jack Dongarra also won an R&D 100 Award for his work with Sandia National Laboratory in developing Fenix, a mechanism that allows computing processes in supercomputers to rapidly recover and keep running if a component fails.
Dongarra and his team at the Innovative Computing Laboratory (ICL) at UT supplied Sandia with the techniques and technology to provide their supercomputing applications with resilience in the face of hardware or process failures.
“Together, we created Fenix, an open-source software that functions like an emergency response team for supercomputing applications,” Dongarra said. “Fenix can detect what’s broken, repair it, restore what was lost, and restart the computing processes from the point of failure—not from the very beginning.”
Fenix, which is available for free and already being used in additional real-world applications, has earned Dongarra and the ICL their fifth R&D 100 Award.
“Fenix comes out of many years of research and development in the ICL,” Dongarra said. “We’re delighted to be in the position to provide such a technology to the scientific community, and our hope is that many more people benefit from it.”
Contact
Rhiannon Potkey (rpotkey@utk.edu)