GOVERNMENT

Today, viewing supercomputers as crucial to scientific discovery, the U.S. Energy Department announced plans to build the world's fastest computer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory's new National Leadership Computing Facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham announced today that the DOE will grant ORNL $25 million in funding to begin to build a 50 teraflop science research supercomputer "critical to our nation's competitiveness." The Energy Department project will involve Cray Corp., International Business Machines and Silicon Graphics Inc., all private companies that have been deeply involved in high-performance computing research. The program will attempt to develop a computer that will surpass Japan's Earth Simulator, built by NEC in 2002 and capable of sustaining nearly 36 trillion calculations per second. Some computers have reached many times that speed, but not on a sustained basis. With the NEC computer in 2002, Japan became the world leader in having the most powerful computer for scientific research — one even faster than computers used at the government nuclear weapons laboratories. While the United States has nine of the 10 fastest computers in the world, according to Top500 Project, a group that tracks supercomputers, U.S. officials fear that U.S. scientists are losing ground in the critical area of ultrahigh speed computing. "Even with this computing power we are seeing other countries working to gain the lead," says Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, adding that the new Japanese computer represents "a new era in scientific computing" that the United States must join. "This computer will propel the United States into the global lead in high-speed computers aimed at scientific discovery," according to Abraham. Ultra-fast supercomputers are considered essential in today's scientific research, from analyzing climate change and developing fusion energy to understanding cellular structures, Energy Department officials said. With the development of the Earth Simulator, many officials believed the United States had lost the lead in scientific computation, although U.S. universities and federal research labs still have many of the fastest computers now operating. Superfast computers do more than solve complicated sets of equations. They allow for sophisticated simulations that lead to scientific discoveries once only found through lengthy experimentation. For example, supercomputers are key in the Energy Department's attempt to simulate the forces of a nuclear explosion, replacing actual bomb testing. "We are making this significant investment in America's scientific infrastructure with the expectation that it will yield a wealth of dividends, major research breakthroughs, significant technological innovations, medical and health advances, enhanced economic competitiveness and improved quality of life," Abraham will tell a group at the Council on Competitiveness in Washington. While the Japanese are to be congratulated for their accomplishment, the United States "must make the commitment necessary to regain the clear-cut lead" in supercomputing, he contends. "This is exactly what we are going to do," promises Abraham. The department chose the Oak Ridge proposal from among four finalists. The others were submitted by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in California. ORNL Director Jeff Wadsworth said, "The National Leadership Computing Facility will be open to scientists and engineers nationwide, independent of their institutional affiliation or source of funding." "The NLCF supercomputer will boost scientific computation to a scale that challenges the threshold of human comprehension," said Dr. Thomas Zacharia, ORNL's associate lab director for Computing and Computational Sciences. "The expansion of computational power will usher in a new era of scientific discovery and help restore American leadership in climate modeling, biology, fusion energy and other fields."