SCIENCE

The Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) will provide more than 950 million processor hours via the Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program, the U.S. government's premier supercomputing allocation, jointly managed by the Department of Energy's leadership computing facilities at Argonne and Oak Ridge National Laboratories.

In all, the OLCF will host thirty projects representing a wide array of scientific inquiry, from combustion to climate to chemistry.

For instance, a project led by Joseph Oefelein of Sandia National Laboratories will study the combustion processes of internal combustion engines, helping to make vehicles more efficient, thus reducing the greenhouse gases produced by the transportation sector and our dependence on oil.

Those same greenhouse gases will be a major part of the research being conducted by a team led by Warren Washington of the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Their Climate End Station II will have a direct influence on national science policy by refining climate models and helping predict future climates based on varying energy policy scenarios.

And a team led by the University of Tennessee's and Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Robert Harrison is seeking to better understand, control, and ultimately design chemical catalytic processes specifically involved in energy-related technologies, such as batteries, fuel cells, and biomass conversion.

"This year's group of proposals was probably the best we've seen to date," said OLCF Director of Science Bronson Messer. "The final list of awardees is a collection of projects that we believe will have remarkably high scientific impact through the use of leadership computing resources."

After peer review and computational readiness evaluations, projects were selected for their potential to advance scientific discoveries, speed technological innovations, and their ability to make use of hundreds of thousands of processors working concertedly to do so.  OLCF computational and computer science experts play a vital role in ensuring INCITE researchers fully harness the power of the supercomputers to meet their goals. They work closely with the scientists and engineers to enhance the fidelity and scalability of the simulations.

The OLCF is home to the most powerful computing complex in the world, including Jaguar, a Cray XT5 capable of 2.33 petaflops of peak performance power. Jaguar's computing muscle not only ranks it among the world's fastest systems but also make it the perfect platform on which to run some of computational science's most demanding codes.

The INCITE program will sponsor a total of 1.7 billion computing hours at both the OLCF and the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, located at Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago, Illinois.