ACADEMIA

Several researchers at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and the Institute for Advanced Computing Applications and Technologies (IACAT) are members of projects that have been awarded access to supercomputers at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois and Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee through the U.S. Department of Energy through the Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program.

Among the 69 projects that were awarded 1.6 billion processor hours are:

• HPC Colony: Removing Scalability, Fault, and Performance Barriers in Leadership Class Systems through Adaptive System Software. IACAT researchers Laxmikant Kale and Celso Mendes are among the co-principal investigators for this project, which is led by Terry Jones of Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
• IACAT deputy director for research William Gropp is a co-principal investigator for two INCITE projects: Performance Evaluation and Analysis Consortium End Station, led by Patrick Worley of Oak Ridge National Laboratory; and Scalable System Software for Performance and Productivity, led by Ewing Lusk of Argonne National Laboratory.
• Predictive and Accurate Monte Carlo Based Simulations for Mott Insulators, Cuprate Superconductors, and Nanoscale Systems. David Ceperley, a researcher with NCSA and IACAT, is a co-principal investigator for this project, which is led by Thomas C. Schulthess, of the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre.
• IACAT researcher Klaus Schulten is the principal investigator for a project on Sculpting Biological Membranes by Proteins. Schulten has also been awarded a Petascale Computing Resource Allocation (PRAC) from the National Science Foundation; the PRAC program enables scientists to work closely with the team that is developing and deploying Blue Waters, the sustained-petaflop supercomputing coming online at NCSA in 2011.
• Prediction of Bulk Properties Using High Accuracy ab initio Methods Interfaced with Dynamical Calculations. NCSA’s Brett Bode is a co-principal investigator for this project, led by Theresa Windus of Ames Laboratory. Members of this team are also involved with PRAC project on computational chemistry.

To learn more about the 2010 INCITE program, visit: http://www.er.doe.gov/ascr/incite/index.html.