The U.S. Department of Energy announced on June 12 that it will invest $32 million over the next four years to accelerate the design of new materials through use of supercomputers.
Seven projects will be supported, three led by
teams at DOE National Laboratories and four by Universities. The teams
are led by Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), Brookhaven National Laboratory
(BNL) and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) as well as the
University of Illinois, the Pennsylvania State University, the University of
Texas and the University of Southern California.
These projects will develop widely applicable open
source software utilizing DOE’s current leadership class and future exascale
computing facilities. The goal is to provide the software platforms and
data for the design of new functional materials with a broad range of
applications, including alternative and renewable energy, electronics, data
storage and materials for quantum information science.
The new awards are part of DOE’s Computational
Materials Sciences (CMS) program, begun in 2015 to reflect the enormous recent
growth in computing power and the increasing capability of high-performance
computers to model and simulate the behavior of matter at the atomic and
molecular scales.
“High performance computing has become an
increasingly powerful tool of scientific discovery and technological
innovation, and our capabilities continue to grow,” said Under Secretary for
Science Paul Dabbar. “These projects will harness America’s leadership in
supercomputing to deliver a new generation of materials for energy and a wide
range of other applications.”
Researchers are expected to make use of current
generation petaflop supercomputers and prepare for next-generation exaflop
machines scheduled for deployment in the early 2020s. Current machines
include the 200-petaflop Summit computer at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing
Facility (OLCF), the 11-petaflop Theta computer at the Argonne Leadership
Computing Facility (ALCF), and the 30-petaflop Cori machine at the National
Energy Research Scientific Computing center (NERSC) at Lawrence Berkeley
National Laboratory (LBNL). OLCF, ALCF, and NERSC are all DOE Office of Science
user facilities. A petaflop is a million-billion floating-point operations
per second. An exaflop is a billion-billion calculations.
Research will combine theory and software
development with experimental validation, drawing on the resources of multiple
DOE Office of Science user facilities, including the Advanced Light Source at
LBNL, the Advanced Photon Source at ANL, the Spallation Neutron Source at Oak
Ridge National Laboratory, the Linac Coherent Light Source at SLAC National
Accelerator Facility and several of the five Nanoscale Science Research Centers
across the DOE national laboratory complex.
Funding for the new projects will total $8 million
in Fiscal Year 2019. Subsequent annual funding will be contingent on
available appropriations and project performance.
Projects were chosen by competitive peer review under a DOE Funding Opportunity Announcement for Computational Materials Sciences. The CMS program is managed by the Department’s Office of Science through its Office of Basic Energy Sciences. Projects announced today are selections for negotiation of financial award. The final details for each project award are subject to final grant and contract negotiations between DOE and the awardees.
Source: DOE
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