Argonne supercomputers help identify CO2-to-ethanol electrocatalyst

In Illinois, by supercomputing standards, Argonne National Lab’s Bebop (1.75 terflops, stood up in 2017, bumped off the Top500 list after the June 2019 ranking) and Blues (stood up in 2012, ranked only that year) are somewhat anachronistic, vestiges of an earlier age. But those veteran systems can still take a star turn, as shown by the results of a research team from Northern Illinois University (NIU) that, with the help of systems at Argonne’s Laboratory Computing Resource Center (LCRC), have identified an electrocatalyst that they say converts carbon dioxide (CO2) and water into ethanol.