ACADEMIA

The Council on Competitiveness today praised the Department of Energy (DOE) for including industry among the academic and research organizations selected to participate in DOE's Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program. The DOE recently announced that four firms, Boeing, Dreamworks Animation, General Atomics and Pratt & Whitney, were awarded time on the some of the world's most powerful high performance computers (HPC). The projects are expected to yield advancements in the design of more efficient aircraft and engines, the development of computing tools to improve computer visualizations and animations, and fusion energy. "The Council on Competitiveness is pleased that DOE listened to the recommendation from our HPC Advisory Committee to allow industry to compete in this prestigious program," said Council on Competitiveness President Deborah L. Wince-Smith. "The DOE's peer review process required for selection to the INCITE program is aggressive, and it is gratifying to see that U.S. businesses are actively pursuing innovation that contributes not just to their own industries, but to the greater national innovation infrastructure. Public/Private partnerships like this and the President's American Competitiveness Initiative are critical to the future competitiveness and economic prosperity of our country." In May 2005, at the recommendation of the Council on Competitiveness, the DOE opened the INCITE program to industry proposals for the first time ever, in addition to universities and other research organizations. U.S. businesses were able to submit proposals to utilize the DOE's most advanced high performance computers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and Argonne National Laboratory. The selected proposals are intended to address complex scientific problems of importance to both industry and DOE. In the DOE's announcement of the award recipients on February 1, Dr. Raymond L. Orbach, Director of DOE's Office of Science discussed the success of the program: "I believe that the overwhelming response to the INCITE program reflects both the computational leadership of the Department of Energy and the widespread recognition of computational science as a tool for scientific discovery. Fortunately, the Office of Science has facilities and expertise to help meet this demand." High Performance Computing Initiative The Council's High Performance Computing Initiative has galvanized a dialogue among government agencies, system and software developers and private sector users of high performance computing to leverage government R&D investment in this technology and facilitate wider usage across the private sector to propel innovation and competitiveness. For more information on the Council's High Performance Computing Initiative and its annual HPC Users Conference please visit its Web site. For more information on the INCITE program and proposals, visit its Web site.