The United States Department of Energy National Laboratories and Technology Centers are a system of facilities and laboratories overseen by the United States Department of Energy (DOE) for the purpose of advancing science and helping promote the economic and defensive national interests of the United States of America. Most of the DOE national laboratories are actually federally funded research and development centers administered, managed, operated and staffed by private corporations and academic universities under contract to DOE. The 2005 NASA Authorization Act designated the U.S. segment of the International Space Station as a national laboratory with a goal to increase the utilization of the ISS by other Federal entities and the private sector.

The system of centralized national laboratories grew out of the massive scientific endeavors of World War II, in which new technologies such as radar, the computer, the proximity fuze, and the atomic bomb proved decisive for the Allied victory. Though the United States government had begun seriously investing in scientific research for national security since World War I, it was only in late 1930s and 1940s that monumental amounts of resources were committed or coordinated to wartime scientific problems, under the auspices first of the National Defense Research Committee, and later the Office of Scientific Research and Development, organized and administered by the MIT engineer Vannevar Bush.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is a multiprogram science and technology national laboratory managed for the United States Department of Energy (DOE) by UT-Battelle. ORNL is the largest science and energy national laboratory in the Department of Energy system. ORNL is located in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, near Knoxville. ORNL's scientific programs focus on materials, neutron science, energy, high-performance computing, systems biology and national security.

ORNL partners with the state of Tennessee, universities and industries to solve challenges in energy, advanced materials, manufacturing, security and physics.

The laboratory is home to several of the world’s top supercomputers and is a leading neutron science and nuclear energy research facility that includes the Spallation Neutron Source and High Flux Isotope Reactor. ORNL hosts the Titan supercomputer; the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences, the BioEnergy Science Center, and the *Consortium for Advanced Simulation of Light-Water Reactors.