ARGONNE, Ill. (Jan. 17, 2008) – Twenty research projects have been awarded more than 111 million hours of computing time at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) at Argonne National Laboratory.
The awards are part of a competitively selected group of 55 scientific projects announced Thursday by the Department of Energy's Office of Science. The awards are made through the 2008 Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE), a DOE program that supports computationally intensive, large-scale research projects. DOE has allocated more than 265 million processor-hours for supercomputing and data storage resources located at Argonne, Oak Ridge, Pacific Northwest and Lawrence Berkeley national laboratories.
"The Department of Energy's Office of Science has two of the top ten most powerful supercomputers, and using them through the INCITE program is having a transformational effect on America's scientific and economic competitiveness," DOE Under Secretary for Science Raymond L. Orbach said. "Once considered the domain of only small groups of researchers, supercomputers today are tools for discovery, driving scientific advancement across a wide range of disciplines. We're proud to provide these resources to help researchers advance scientific knowledge and understanding and thereby to provide insight into major scientific and industrial issues."
At Argonne, new and returning INCITE researchers will conduct projects ranging from large-scale simulations of potentially dangerous heart rhythm disorders to running detailed numerical experiments of thermal striping in sodium-cooled fast reactors.
"It is thrilling to see the broad range of scientific projects to be conducted at Argonne," Argonne Director Robert Rosner said. "The investigators on these projects will be able to conduct cutting-edge research that will take only a few weeks or months – a relatively short period of time compared to the years and decades that would have been needed without DOE's supercomputing resources. That means important scientific findings can be made more quickly and used to develop technologies that will benefit U.S. economic competitiveness and address society's concerns about the environment, clean and efficient energy, climate change, and healthcare, to name just a few."
"For example, Andrew Siegel, Argonne's project leader for nuclear simulation, will have the opportunity through INCITE to test a set of integrated models that will help to optimize and validate the design and safety of a new generation of advanced recycle reactors," Rosner said. "The integration of these models would represent a sea change over the traditional reliance on expensive instrumented experiments. In the long run, advanced simulation will significantly reduce the cost to construct new nuclear reactors, a carbon emissions-free source of electricity."
ALCF Director Raymond Bair said that, "Argonne has expanded its supercomputing capabilities to give scientists even more advanced computing resources with which to conduct more detailed and accurate simulations of scientific problems. Within the last year, the ALCF has expanded its computing power by more than a factor of twenty, to 111 teraflops. Argonne's recent order for a 445-teraflops IBM Blue Gene/P supercomputer will soon bring the ALCF a total computing power of 556 teraflops. A lot of important science is going to be done on this machine."
Of the 20 INCITE projects that will use the Blue Gene/P at Argonne, 13 are new projects and seven are projects renewed from 2007.
New projects:
In renewed endeavors:
Returning INCITE researchers tout the enabling research the program has already facilitated.
Igor Tsigelny of the University of California-San Diego wrote in a SciDAC Review article about his DOE-supported work that: "Using the IBM Blue Gene's considerable computer simulation power, researchers have made major strides in evaluating the molecular and environmental features that led to the clinical diagnosis of Parkinson's disease and Lewy body dementia, as well as to strategies for pharmaceutical intervention and amelioration of Parkinson's disease. Their findings also have broad applicability to other diseases such as Alzheimer's disease, rheumatoid arthritis, type II diabetes mellitus, and spongiform encephelopathies (prion diseases)."
Peter Bradley of Pratt & Whitney, said "The DOE's INCITE program has been a very valuable tool in developing Pratt & Whitney's next generation of green engine technology. Pratt & Whitney's INCITE award is enabling the development of new computer simulation techniques being used to design a new family of commercial aircraft engines that will deliver unprecedented fuel efficiency and double-digit reductions in greenhouse gas emissions." Giulia Galli, a chemistry professor at the University of California-Davis said that, "Access to dedicated computer time on a high-performance platform is one of the key ingredients for the success of complex investigations. At ANL, we not only have access to a very powerful machine and dedicated cycles, but also to a very competent and efficient staff who are extremely helpful in facilitating our work and in fixing our problems as we encounter them. So we have quite a number of reasons to be grateful."
And David Baker, a biochemistry professor at the University of Washington, said that, "The INCITE program is making possible the exploration of whole new areas in computational structural biology."
New INCITE awardees, such as Jeffrey Fox, vice president of cardiovascular research for Gene Network Sciences, a privately held biosimulation company, are looking forward to the opportunity to use the Blue Gene/P facility. "We’re excited about the INCITE award and the opportunity to use the Argonne machine," Fox said. "It will help us conduct large-scale simulations that we could not consider attempting without such a resource."
The next round for INCITE competition will be announced this summer. Expansion of the DOE Office of Science’s computational capabilities should approximately quadruple the 2009 INCITE award allocations to close to a billion processor hours. This opportunity, available to all on a competitive basis, will lead to scientific discovery on an unprecedented scale.
About Argonne
Argonne National Laboratory, a renowned R&D center, brings the world's brightest scientists and engineers together to find exciting and creative new solutions to pressing national problems in science and technology. The nation's first national laboratory, Argonne conducts leading-edge basic and applied scientific research in virtually every scientific discipline. Argonne researchers work closely with researchers from hundreds of companies, universities, and federal, state and municipal agencies to help them solve their specific problems, advance America’s scientific leadership and prepare the nation for a better future. With employees from more than 60 nations, Argonne is managed by UChicago Argonne, LLC for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.
Additional information: To read the Department of Energy's INCITE announcement, please visit http://www.doe.gov/sciencetech/5849.htm .
For more information on the INCITE program, please visit http://www.sc.doe.gov/ascr/incite/index.html .