WASHINGTON, DC -- Secretary of Energy Samuel W. Bodman announced today that DOE’s Office of Science is seeking proposals to support computational science projects to enable high-impact advances through the use of some of the world’s most powerful supercomputers.  Successful proposers will be given the use of nearly 90 million computing hours at the department’s scientific computing centers in Berkeley, Calif. and Oak Ridge, Tenn.

“Advanced scientific computing is critical to DOE’s missions,” said Secretary Bodman.

“This program opens up the world of high-performance computing to a broad array of scientific users.  Through the use of these advanced systems, scientists have made important progress in several grand challenge research areas, including combustion, astrophysics, protein structure, chemistry and engineering.”

Computing time will be made available at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing (NERSC) Center at DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, Calif., and the Leadership Computing Facility (LCF) resources in the National Center for Computational Sciences at DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, Tenn.

The Office of Science seeks high priority, high payoff, computationally intensive experiments, where the department’s computers can enable new breakthroughs in science.  Researchers currently funded by DOE’s Office of Science and other researchers whose projects are relevant to the office’s mission may apply to use the high performance computing resources.  DOE researchers currently use high performance computing to tackle some of the greatest scientific challenges, including understanding global climate change, researching future energy sources, protecting the environment, developing new materials, understanding the role of genetics in disease and gaining greater insight into the makeup of our universe.

“Over the past 30 years, the Office of Science’s high performance computing program has played an increasingly important role in scientific research by allowing scientists to create more accurate models of processes, simulate problems that were once thought impossible and to analyze the increasing amount of data generated by experiments,” said Dr. Raymond L. Orbach, Director of the Office of Science. “This combined approach to allocating valuable computing resources to worthy scientific research reflects our commitment to staying at the forefront of science.”

NERSC is the Office of Science’s flagship high-end capability computing facility with an emphasis on larger jobs using 512 or more processors.  Successful proposals will be awarded time on the 6,656-processor IBM SP supercomputer known as Seaborg and other resources currently being deployed.  In addition to computational and storage resources, NERSC offers a wide range of user support services.  Additional information can be found at http://www.nersc.gov/.

This program will award allocations for an estimated 250 projects at NERSC.  A total of 50 million processor-hours will be awarded on Seaborg through the 2006 allocations.  The deadline for submitting proposals for NERSC resources is Sept. 1, 2005.  The NERSC allocations year runs from Dec. 1, 2005, through Sept. 30, 2006.  

At the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, a limited set of scientific applications – an estimated 10 per year -- will be selected and given substantial access to the leadership systems.  Much smaller time allocations could be available to additional applications for pilot experiments in preparation for full-scale runs in the future. 

This program will award a total of six million processor hours on the 1,024 vector processor Cray X1E system, known as Phoenix, and 31 million processor hours on the 5,212 scalar processor Cray XT3 system, known as Jaguar.  Additional information on the Oak Ridge facilities can be found at http://nccs.gov/.

The deadline for submitting proposals for LCF resources is August 12, 2005.  Awards are expected to be announced by Sept. 15, 2005, with access to the NCCS facilities to run from Oct. 3, 2005, to Sept. 30, 2006. 

The Call for Proposals under this program is available at http://hpc.science.doe.gov/proposalCallFY06.do

This Call for Proposals is in addition to the May 16, 2005, Call for Proposals under the department’s Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program that will allocate 10 percent of the computer time at the LBNL and Oak Ridge machines, as well as five percent of the computer time at DOE’s Argonne and Pacific Northwest National Laboratories.  The INCITE program is open to all scientific researchers and research organizations, including industry.

DOE’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the nation and ensures U.S. world leadership across a broad range of scientific disciplines.  More information about the Office of Science can be found at http://www.science.doe.gov/.

Media contact:
Jeff Sherwood, 202/586-5806