INTERCONNECTS

Oak Ridge Associated Universities (ORAU) announces a call for proposals for a series of high-performance computing grants that would allow faculty and student research teams the opportunity to participate in research with the benefit of Oak Ridge National Laboratory's (ORNL) computing resources and staff. The competitive grant program, open to ORAU's 97 member institutions, provides potential funding of up to $75,000 for three years, allowing participant teams the opportunity to take full advantage of ORNL's ultrascale computing resources for scientific discovery in any discipline.

The second annual ORAU/ORNL High-Performance Computing Grant competition kicks off at a time when ORNL's "Jaguar" supercomputer is poised to become the world's fastest computer, with potential peak processing capacity of more than 2 petaflops, or 2,000 trillion calculations per second. The program presents an opportunity for university research to expand their existing research initiatives and demonstrate alignment with ORNL's cross-cutting science agenda as it relates to computing and computational sciences.

"With the many critical needs that our country faces in energy, climate, health and other scientific areas, performing leading-edge research more quickly and accurately with the benefit of supercomputers will be invaluable to university researchers," said ORAU President Andy Page. "The computational capability at ORNL is world-class, and this opportunity for faculty and students would not be possible without the support of staff time and computing resources from the lab."

Jeff Nichols, ORNL's interim associate lab director for scientific computing, noted that in order for substantial advances to be made in scientific discovery, university contributions through joint research collaborations such as this program are a must. "ORAU is an integrator of knowledge and capabilities across a broad range of research institutions in their consortium," said Nichols. "Their leadership in engaging graduate and undergraduate students, postdoctoral researchers and faculty for this type of scientific discovery through advanced computing is critical."

The deadline to submit a pre-proposal is September 30, 2009, with grant winners expected to be announced in February 2010. For more information, please see the ORAU/ORNL High Performance Computing Grant Program page on the ORAU Web site. UT-Battelle manages Oak Ridge National Laboratory for the Department of Energy.