CHEMISTRY

The Swiss National Supercomputing Center (CSCS) announced the first awards of the newly launched Swiss ALPS (Advanced Large Projects in Supercomputing). Over the next two years, the program may use up to half the time on the center's supercomputers for projects with a high potential to achieve breakthroughs, both for science and supercomputing techniques, according to CSCS CEO Dr. Marie-Christine Sawley. The following four Swiss projects were selected for investigation: - The origin of magnetic fields of the earth and other planets (principal investigator: Andrew Jackson). - At the molecular level, how cell function and behaviour changes under mechanical force (principal investigator: Viola Vogel). - Climate change on European and Alpine scales and possible future extreme weather events (principal investigator: Christoph Schär). - The role of protein interactions of interest in diseases such as Alzheimer's and HIV (principal investigator: Michele Parrinello). The Swiss ALPS awards are for two years each. The work will be carried out on the center's 1664-processor Cray XT3 and new IBM 768-processor p5-575 systems. It is envisaged that up to 16 million CPU hours will be used to carry out these four projects. Aside from targeting significant breakthroughs, qualifying projects must require a large amount of compute time that cannot be found anywhere else in Switzerland, as well as strong collaboration between CSCS and the research groups. "With the launch of these grand challenge projects, CSCS strengthens its role as a key partner for Swiss scientists to carry out ground-breaking research," Sawley said.