Steven Chu’s DOE Legacy: Big Science, Grand Challenges and Solyndra

By Tiffany Trader

February 5, 2013

US Energy Secretary Steven Chu oversaw the nation’s energy policy at one of the most politically divisive times in recent history. Last Friday he announced that he would step down from the job. As a big champion of Big Science and its potential to change the country’s economic and environmental landscape – with government aid – many people welcome the change while others are sad to see him go.

Both views are based on one fact: During his four-year term, Chu emphasized the role of science and technology funding in national innovation and competitiveness.

In many people’s view, his greatest achievement was bringing science back to the forefront of energy policy after years of neglect under previous administrations.

To others, his decision to provide $535 million in federal loan guarantees to Solyndra, a solar energy company that later went bankrupt, makes him the poster child for government misspending.

A physics professor, Nobel Prize winner, and Bell Labs investigator, Chu has always been a huge proponent of the transformative power of research.

President Obama praised Chu for his efforts to bring about that transformation. “Over the past four years we have doubled the use of renewable energy, reduced our dependence on foreign oil and put our country on a path to win the global race for clean-energy jobs,” the President said.

Chu pushed the idea that high performance computing should play a key role in overcoming today’s difficult energy challenges. As head of the DOE, he was responsible for some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. DOE’s Office of Science makes supercomputers available to researchers who use them to simulate everything from the components of a proton to the mechanisms of an exploding star. At a 2010 summit in Washington, D.C., he asserted that the “the DOE strategy should be to make simulation part of everyone’s toolbox.”

In 1997, Chu, along with several Bell Lab colleagues, won the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on laser cooling. An article at Quartz by Steve LeVine examines how Chu set out to recreate the prolific Bell Laboratory model in Washington using focused funding streams and strategic innovation centers.

Chu’s approach was multi-pronged. First, he created 46 Energy Frontier Research Centers (EFRCs), funded at $2-5 million per year per center for an initial five-year year. These integrated, multi-investigator centers, operated by the DOE Office of Science, target “grand challenge” problems in order to transform “the way we generate, supply, transmit, store, and use energy.”

“The EFRCs neatly fit the Bell mantra,” writes LeVine. “Give a group of talented scientists a specific objective, the freedom to solve it how they see fit, a reasonable sum to work with, and let them go to the task. They might fail spectacularly, but Bell thought that was also how they may succeed.”

Next >>

The second piece of Chu’s plan was to establish five Energy Innovation Hubs, each of which receive up to $125 million in funding over five years. Their mission, according to the DOE, is “to shorten the path from laboratory innovation to technological development, and lead the way toward American competitiveness, economic growth and energy security.” Researchers from different labs are simulating nuclear reactors, developing biofuels from sunlight, designing energy efficient buildings, advancing electrochemical energy storage, and enhancing the supply of critical energy materials.

Chu also oversaw the development of Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), a DOE incubator project that was modeled after the Defense Department’s DARPA program. As Chu explains, “ARPA-E was designed to support high-risk, high reward technology development; to swing for game-changing home runs that can fundamentally transform energy technologies.”

Many people in science and industry have praised the program. In his ARPA-E Summit Keynote, FedEx founder and CEO Fred Smith characterized it as “the best government funding program” he had ever seen.

But not everybody was so happy with Chu’s approach to government/industry collaboration. Republicans launched withering attacks against his handling of the Solyndra loan program after the solar panel maker and four other government-funded energy companies went belly-up on his watch. Some of the comments upon his resignation have not been so kind.

“While many will remember Secretary Chu for his comments about the need to raise gas prices on American consumers and the high grades he publicly bestowed on himself,” said House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa in a statement, “I found taxpayer losses on projects like Solyndra and the department’s deeply misguided effort to use taxpayer dollars as an investment bank for unproven technologies to be the most problematic aspects of his legacy.”

Chu takes responsibility for these “failures” in his resignation letter, but insists there is a larger context. Innovation, he says, requires risk:

The test for America’s policy makers will be whether they are willing to accept a few failures in exchange for many successes. America’s entrepreneurs and innovators who are leaders in global clean energy race understand that not every risk can – or should – be avoided. Michelangelo said, “The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark.”

It’s true the research beds that Chu established are still in their early years, but he believes that they will give life to the same kind of game-changing advances associated with Bell Labs and other legendary institutions. “Some of those goals have been realized, and we have planted many seeds together,” he said in his resignation letter. “Just as today’s boom in shale gas production was made possible by Department of Energy research from 1978 to 1991, some of [our] most significant work may not be known for decades. What matters is that our country will reap the benefits of what we have started.”

His final legacy will have to wait for those decades to pass and demonstrate whether or not his words prove true.

Related Articles

US Energy Secretary Talks Supercomputing

Steven Chu Announces the Scalable Data Management, Analysis, and Visualization Institute

Three DOE Labs Now Connected with Ultra-High Speed Network

Supercomputing Key to US Leadership

Subscribe to HPCwire's Weekly Update!

Be the most informed person in the room! Stay ahead of the tech trends with industry updates delivered to you every week!

MLPerf Inference 4.0 Results Showcase GenAI; Nvidia Still Dominates

March 28, 2024

There were no startling surprises in the latest MLPerf Inference benchmark (4.0) results released yesterday. Two new workloads — Llama 2 and Stable Diffusion XL — were added to the benchmark suite as MLPerf continues Read more…

Q&A with Nvidia’s Chief of DGX Systems on the DGX-GB200 Rack-scale System

March 27, 2024

Pictures of Nvidia's new flagship mega-server, the DGX GB200, on the GTC show floor got favorable reactions on social media for the sheer amount of computing power it brings to artificial intelligence.  Nvidia's DGX Read more…

Call for Participation in Workshop on Potential NSF CISE Quantum Initiative

March 26, 2024

Editor’s Note: Next month there will be a workshop to discuss what a quantum initiative led by NSF’s Computer, Information Science and Engineering (CISE) directorate could entail. The details are posted below in a Ca Read more…

Waseda U. Researchers Reports New Quantum Algorithm for Speeding Optimization

March 25, 2024

Optimization problems cover a wide range of applications and are often cited as good candidates for quantum computing. However, the execution time for constrained combinatorial optimization applications on quantum device Read more…

NVLink: Faster Interconnects and Switches to Help Relieve Data Bottlenecks

March 25, 2024

Nvidia’s new Blackwell architecture may have stolen the show this week at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California. But an emerging bottleneck at the network layer threatens to make bigger and brawnier pro Read more…

Who is David Blackwell?

March 22, 2024

During GTC24, co-founder and president of NVIDIA Jensen Huang unveiled the Blackwell GPU. This GPU itself is heavily optimized for AI work, boasting 192GB of HBM3E memory as well as the the ability to train 1 trillion pa Read more…

MLPerf Inference 4.0 Results Showcase GenAI; Nvidia Still Dominates

March 28, 2024

There were no startling surprises in the latest MLPerf Inference benchmark (4.0) results released yesterday. Two new workloads — Llama 2 and Stable Diffusion Read more…

Q&A with Nvidia’s Chief of DGX Systems on the DGX-GB200 Rack-scale System

March 27, 2024

Pictures of Nvidia's new flagship mega-server, the DGX GB200, on the GTC show floor got favorable reactions on social media for the sheer amount of computing po Read more…

NVLink: Faster Interconnects and Switches to Help Relieve Data Bottlenecks

March 25, 2024

Nvidia’s new Blackwell architecture may have stolen the show this week at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California. But an emerging bottleneck at Read more…

Who is David Blackwell?

March 22, 2024

During GTC24, co-founder and president of NVIDIA Jensen Huang unveiled the Blackwell GPU. This GPU itself is heavily optimized for AI work, boasting 192GB of HB Read more…

Nvidia Looks to Accelerate GenAI Adoption with NIM

March 19, 2024

Today at the GPU Technology Conference, Nvidia launched a new offering aimed at helping customers quickly deploy their generative AI applications in a secure, s Read more…

The Generative AI Future Is Now, Nvidia’s Huang Says

March 19, 2024

We are in the early days of a transformative shift in how business gets done thanks to the advent of generative AI, according to Nvidia CEO and cofounder Jensen Read more…

Nvidia’s New Blackwell GPU Can Train AI Models with Trillions of Parameters

March 18, 2024

Nvidia's latest and fastest GPU, codenamed Blackwell, is here and will underpin the company's AI plans this year. The chip offers performance improvements from Read more…

Nvidia Showcases Quantum Cloud, Expanding Quantum Portfolio at GTC24

March 18, 2024

Nvidia’s barrage of quantum news at GTC24 this week includes new products, signature collaborations, and a new Nvidia Quantum Cloud for quantum developers. Wh Read more…

Alibaba Shuts Down its Quantum Computing Effort

November 30, 2023

In case you missed it, China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba has shut down its quantum computing research effort. It’s not entirely clear what drove the change. Read more…

Nvidia H100: Are 550,000 GPUs Enough for This Year?

August 17, 2023

The GPU Squeeze continues to place a premium on Nvidia H100 GPUs. In a recent Financial Times article, Nvidia reports that it expects to ship 550,000 of its lat Read more…

Shutterstock 1285747942

AMD’s Horsepower-packed MI300X GPU Beats Nvidia’s Upcoming H200

December 7, 2023

AMD and Nvidia are locked in an AI performance battle – much like the gaming GPU performance clash the companies have waged for decades. AMD has claimed it Read more…

DoD Takes a Long View of Quantum Computing

December 19, 2023

Given the large sums tied to expensive weapon systems – think $100-million-plus per F-35 fighter – it’s easy to forget the U.S. Department of Defense is a Read more…

Synopsys Eats Ansys: Does HPC Get Indigestion?

February 8, 2024

Recently, it was announced that Synopsys is buying HPC tool developer Ansys. Started in Pittsburgh, Pa., in 1970 as Swanson Analysis Systems, Inc. (SASI) by John Swanson (and eventually renamed), Ansys serves the CAE (Computer Aided Engineering)/multiphysics engineering simulation market. Read more…

Choosing the Right GPU for LLM Inference and Training

December 11, 2023

Accelerating the training and inference processes of deep learning models is crucial for unleashing their true potential and NVIDIA GPUs have emerged as a game- Read more…

Intel’s Server and PC Chip Development Will Blur After 2025

January 15, 2024

Intel's dealing with much more than chip rivals breathing down its neck; it is simultaneously integrating a bevy of new technologies such as chiplets, artificia Read more…

Baidu Exits Quantum, Closely Following Alibaba’s Earlier Move

January 5, 2024

Reuters reported this week that Baidu, China’s giant e-commerce and services provider, is exiting the quantum computing development arena. Reuters reported � Read more…

Leading Solution Providers

Contributors

Comparing NVIDIA A100 and NVIDIA L40S: Which GPU is Ideal for AI and Graphics-Intensive Workloads?

October 30, 2023

With long lead times for the NVIDIA H100 and A100 GPUs, many organizations are looking at the new NVIDIA L40S GPU, which it’s a new GPU optimized for AI and g Read more…

Shutterstock 1179408610

Google Addresses the Mysteries of Its Hypercomputer 

December 28, 2023

When Google launched its Hypercomputer earlier this month (December 2023), the first reaction was, "Say what?" It turns out that the Hypercomputer is Google's t Read more…

AMD MI3000A

How AMD May Get Across the CUDA Moat

October 5, 2023

When discussing GenAI, the term "GPU" almost always enters the conversation and the topic often moves toward performance and access. Interestingly, the word "GPU" is assumed to mean "Nvidia" products. (As an aside, the popular Nvidia hardware used in GenAI are not technically... Read more…

Shutterstock 1606064203

Meta’s Zuckerberg Puts Its AI Future in the Hands of 600,000 GPUs

January 25, 2024

In under two minutes, Meta's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, laid out the company's AI plans, which included a plan to build an artificial intelligence system with the eq Read more…

Google Introduces ‘Hypercomputer’ to Its AI Infrastructure

December 11, 2023

Google ran out of monikers to describe its new AI system released on December 7. Supercomputer perhaps wasn't an apt description, so it settled on Hypercomputer Read more…

China Is All In on a RISC-V Future

January 8, 2024

The state of RISC-V in China was discussed in a recent report released by the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. The report, entitled "E Read more…

Intel Won’t Have a Xeon Max Chip with New Emerald Rapids CPU

December 14, 2023

As expected, Intel officially announced its 5th generation Xeon server chips codenamed Emerald Rapids at an event in New York City, where the focus was really o Read more…

IBM Quantum Summit: Two New QPUs, Upgraded Qiskit, 10-year Roadmap and More

December 4, 2023

IBM kicks off its annual Quantum Summit today and will announce a broad range of advances including its much-anticipated 1121-qubit Condor QPU, a smaller 133-qu Read more…

  • arrow
  • Click Here for More Headlines
  • arrow
HPCwire