INDUSTRY

A University of Rochester researcher has won 2 million hours of computing time on a supercomputer from the U.S. Department of Energy for his fusion research. Chuang Ren, assistant professor of mechanical engineering and physics, has received 2 million hours of time on the NERSC HPC supercomputer at the California-based Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to run massive simulations of fast ignition — a method of achieving fusion. The hours will be used between now and early 2008. Ren’s supercomputing time is measured in “processor hours.” According to UR, a project receiving 2 million hours could run on 4,000 processors for 500 hours. Running 2 million hours on a single-processor desktop computer would take more than 228 years. Ren is one of 45 researchers from universities and companies around the nation awarded time in the 2007 Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment. Launched in 2003, the award is aimed at advancing U.S. science and business competitiveness by backing intensive, large-scale research projects with large amounts of dedicated time on federal supercomputers.