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DOE Allocates NERSC Supercomputing Resources to Research
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Contact: Jon Bashor JBashor@lbl.gov, 510-486-5849 | ||||||||||||
BERKELEY, Calif. — The U.S. Department of Energy announced today that it is allocating about 10.4 million CPU hours on supercomputers at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory as part of a program to accelerate scientific discoveries in multiple disciplines, including climate, physics, combustion and material science. The one-year allocations will go to 11 projects by researchers in universities, national labs and industry. Last year, the DOE allotted nearly 9 million CPU hours at NERSC to seven projects.
The awards are part of a program called Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE), launched in 2003. INCITE, supported by the DOE Office of Science, selects projects that not only require large-scale and intensive use of supercomputers but also promise to deliver a significant advance in science and engineering. Overall, the INCITE program is awarding more than 265 million CPU hours to 55 projects for 2008, up from 95 million CPU hours for 45 projects in 2007. “The Department of Energy’s Office of Science has two of the top 10 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.” In addition to the projects at NERSC, other INCITE projects were awarded time at DOE’s Leadership Computing Facilities at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, and the Molecular Science Computing Facility at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Washington. As the flagship facility for the Office of Science, NERSC provided the only computing resources available during the first two years of the program. One of the projects at NERSC is led by Gilbert Compo from the University of Colorado who will produce a global tropospheric circulation dataset dating back to 1892. The dataset will help validate the climate models being used to make climate projections for the 21st century. The only dataset available for the early 20th century consists of error-ridden, hand-drawn analyses of the mean sea level pressure field over the Northern Hemisphere. “The allocation has been invaluable. Without it, we could not have generated a dataset of the 6-hourly global weather maps spanning 1918 to 1949 that will be used to understand the Dust Bowl and dramatic Arctic warming of 1920-1940s, among other climate and weather anomalies of the period,” said Compo, who also works with the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Compo, who received an INCITE allocation last year, will be computing at NERSC again this year. Here are descriptions of other 10 projects awarded computing time at NERSC:
Eleven Berkeley Lab researchers also will take part in four INCITE projects that will be carried out in other DOE supercomputer centers. Lin-Wang Wang will lead a project to explore how and which nano-scale materials should be used for designing better electronic devices, including solar cells. Juan Meza and Zhenji Zhao, both from Berkeley Lab, will take part in this research. Other Berkeley Lab researchers participating in INCITE projects are Bill McCurdy, Tom Rescigno, Ann Almgren, John Bell, Marc Day, David H. Bailey, Lenny Oliker and Kathy Yelick. The DOE announcement of the 2008 INCITE awards can be found at http://energy.gov/news/5849.htm. More information about the INCITE program can be found at http://www.sc.doe.gov/ascr/incite/index.html. The Office of Science is the nation's largest supporter of basic research in physical sciences. More information about the 2008 INCITE allocations can be found at http://www.sc.doe.gov/ascr/INCITE/index.html. The NERSC Center is the flagship scientific computing facility for DOE's Office of Science. Located at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif., NERSC enables interdisciplinary teams of scientists to address fundamental problems in science and engineering that require massive calculations and have broad scientific and economic impacts. Go to http://www.nersc.gov for more information. Berkeley Lab is a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory located in Berkeley, California. It conducts unclassified scientific research and is managed by the University of California. Visit our website at http://www.lbl.gov. |
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