ACADEMIA

For the second year, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is seeking proposals for large-scale computing allocations to support cutting-edge, computationally intensive science and engineering of national interest under the National Leadership Computing System (NLCS) initiative. Successful proposals will receive large allocations on NASA's premier high-end computing system--the Columbia supercomputer located at Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, CA. The 10,240-processor SGI Altix system currently ranks fourth on the TOP500 supercomputer list. The deadline for submitting proposals for 2007 allocations is Tuesday, January 16, 2007. "The NLCS initiative demonstrates NASA's support for important national priorities and its commitment to continued U.S. leadership in high- end computing and computational modeling," said Steve Miley, Director, Shared Capability Assets Program at NASA Headquarters. "By inviting government, industry, and academia participation, NASA advances U.S. technology and education and enhances national competitiveness." For the 2007 NLCS call, NASA is allocating 4.5 million processor- hours per year (5 percent of the total Columbia resource) to non-NASA researchers doing computationally intensive research that can make high-impact scientific or engineering advances through an NLCS award. NASA anticipates making four to eight large computing allocation awards for the period April 1, 2007 to March 31, 2008. From the 2006 NLCS call, four projects were awarded 4.65 million processor-hours from the 18 submitted proposals, which requested a total of 21 million processor-hours on Columbia. NLCS proposals will be rated and ranked by a panel of program managers and discipline scientists assembled from several federal agencies, along with other invited experts. The ranking will consider the potential scientific or engineering impact, need for the features of the Columbia system, and computer science merit (e.g., readiness to perform leadership-scale computations, use of advanced algorithms, efficient use of resources). The selection panel will favor a broad distribution of projects across disciplines and sponsoring organizations. Final decisions regarding NLCS projects and allocations will be made by NASA management. The complete call for proposals and online submission system are accessible at its Web site. More information about the Columbia facility is available at its Web site.