| News |
| Funding |
| The INCITE program builds on success in 2005 |
| Barbara Helland |
|
As one of the world's leading sponsors of scientific research, the US Department of Energy (DOE) launched a major program in 2003 to allocate millions of hours of supercomputing time to address some of the most challenging research problems in physics, chemistry, genetics, and energy. Called Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE), the program seeks computationally intensive large-scale research projects each year that can make high-impact scientific advances via a substantial allocation of computer time and data storage. Such large allocations are critical to advancing understanding in areas such as astrophysics, global climate change, fusion energy and combustion.
|
|
The INCITE program specifically encourages proposals from non-DOE researchers, including researchers in industry.
|
|
In the first two years of the competitive program, the DOE Office of Science received and reviewed 75 proposals, requesting a total of nearly 160 million hours of processing time. About twothirds of the proposals came from university researchers.
|
|
In 2003, three projects received a total of 4.9 million processor hours at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to undertake studies to advance our understanding of the composition of the universe; the chemical process by which plants convert sunlight to energy while removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere; and the turbulent forces that affect everything from weather to industrial processes.
|
|
In INCITE's second year, the selected projects received a total of 6.5 million processor hours at NERSC and aimed to gain greater insight into how stars and solar systems form; look into ways to reduce pollution; and advance our knowledge about how proteins express genetic information.
|
|
In 2005, building on past successes, INCITE expanded a single supercomputing facility at LBNL to include five supercomputers at four DOE labs in Berkeley, CA; Chicago, IL; Oak Ridge, TN; and Richland, WA. Specifically, 10% of the Cray Leadership-class computers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL); 10% of the IBM Power 3 at LBNL; and 10% of the resources on the IBM BlueGene machine at Argonne National Laboratory, together with 5% of the HP MPP system at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, were dedicated to the expanded INCITE program. And in a new collaboration between IBM and ANL, IBM agreed to augment Argonne's INCITE computer capacity with compute cycles on IBM's Blue Gene system at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY.
|
|
As a result of the call for proposals, 43 computationally intensive, large-scale research projects were submitted, requesting over 95 million processor hours. In January, 2006, the DOE awarded 18.2 million hours of computing time across the four sites to 15 INCITE projects. For the first time ever, four of the proposals receiving awards were from industry: Boeing; Dreamworks Animation; General Atomics; and Pratt Whitney. Academic, research institutions and others to receive computing time are: Auburn University; California Institute of Technology; Fisk University, Harvard University; Howard Hughes Medical Institute; Rollins College; Tech-X Corp.; University of Alaska, Fairbanks; University of California, Berkeley; University of California, Davis; University of California, San Diego; University of Colorado; University of Strathclyde; and University of Washington. Scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley, Lawrence Livermore, Oak Ridge, and Los Alamos National Laboratories will also receive computing time.
|
Those receiving INCITE awards in the coming year will use their allocations to work on diverse projects, including:
- improving aircraft efficiency
- learning about disease
- advancing fusion power
- studying climate change
- developing stronger materials
- simulating molecular collisions
- developing computing tools
- studying water and how light affects it in biological systems
- modeling protein structure
- demystifying dark energy
- simulating particle accelerators.
|
|
The call for 2007 INCITE proposals is expected to be released in mid-spring, 2006. For more information about the INCITE program and the 2006 awardees, see http://hpc.science.doe.gov.
|
|
Barbara Helland is Program Manager, Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research.
|
|
|
