U.S. Energy Agency Awards Supercomputing Time To Advance Science
Washington -- The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science has awarded 95 million hours of computing time on some of the world’s most powerful supercomputers to 45 projects proposed by scientists at universities and in industry.
(Media-Newswire.com) - Access to government machines to benefit astronomy, climate and energy studies
By Cheryl Pellerin USINFO Staff Writer
The projects, with applications from aeronautics and astrophysics to combustion research and consumer products, were chosen by an international panel of judges based on the potential impact of the research and the projects’ suitability for supercomputing.
DOE Under Secretary for Science Raymond Orbach presented the awards January 8 in Washington as part of the agency’s 2007 Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment ( INCITE ) program.
A supercomputer is a computer that leads the world in terms of processing capacity, particularly speed of calculation, at the time it is introduced.
In 2007, for example, DOE’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center in California will make available to scientists a supercomputer that has 45,000 times the processing power, 76,000 times the memory and 7 million times the bandwidth of a regular laptop computer.
“What we’re seeing now is a transformation in the way we do computation,” Orbach said. “It’s a new sociology for science, for achievement, for discovery ... What you’re seeing today is in some way an opening salvo, to declare that this is the future of our country in innovation and scientific discovery.” ( See related article. )
SCIENCE AND SUPERCOMPUTING
Supercomputers play an increasingly important role in scientific research by helping scientists create more accurate models of complex processes, simulate problems whose solutions were once thought to be impossible, and analyze the growing amount of data generated by experiments.
Supercomputers allow cutting-edge research and the design of virtual prototypes to be carried out in weeks or months rather than the years or decades that conventional computers would require.
“The Department of Energy’s Office of Science has one of the top 10 most powerful supercomputers in the world and four of the top 100,” DOE Secretary Samuel Bodman said in a statement, “and we’re proud to provide these resources to help researchers advance scientific knowledge and understanding.”
DOE launched INCITE in 2003 to advance U.S. science and industrial competitiveness and to support computationally intensive, large-scale research projects by providing large amounts of dedicated time on DOE supercomputers.
“One of the most important aspects of the INCITE program is that the resulting knowledge will largely be available, so that the information and technologies can be used by other researchers, further broadening the impact of this work,” Orbach said.
Research advanced by the INCITE program has allowed scientists to design quieter cars, improve commercial aircraft design, advance fusion energy, study supernovas, understand nanomaterials ( materials on a scale of atoms and molecules ), study global climate change and determine the causes of Parkinson’s disease.
AWARD WINNERS
Research areas to be addressed in 2007 include accelerator physics, astrophysics, chemical sciences, climate research, computer science, engineering physics, environmental science, fusion energy, life sciences, materials science, nuclear physics and nuclear engineering.
“We are increasingly challenged to get our products to market faster, at lower cost, and to be safer and more environmentally friendly,” said Michael Garrett, director of airplane configuration, integration and performance for Boeing Commercial Airplanes, one of the 2007 winners. “To meet these changes, we have to develop new analysis tools and processes ... and do more through simulation.”
High-performance computing and supercomputers, he added, have “fundamentally changed the way we build not only our commercial transport products but fighters and space vehicles as well.”
A press release and a document summarizing the 2007 INCITE awards ( PDF, 45 pages ) are available at the DOE Web site.
( USINFO is produced by the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov )
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