HPCwire: INCITE Program Targets American Competitiveness

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February 09, 2007

INCITE Program Targets American Competitiveness

by Steve Conway, HPCwire Reporter

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In this exclusive HPCwire interview, Dr. Raymond Orbach, director of the Department of Energy's (DOE) Office of Science and the nation's first Under Secretary for Science, and Council on Competitiveness President Deborah L. Wince-Smith discuss the value of DOE's INCITE program. INCITE awards huge blocks of time on DOE supercomputers to university, industrial and national laboratory research projects with strong potential for HPC-assisted breakthroughs.

HPCwire: How and when did the INCITE program come about?

Dr. Orbach: We launched the program in 2003, more out of instinct than anything else. We believed science and industry would profit from greater access to high-end computation. The problem back then was that in the U.S., we in the government were awarding computer time more to maximize the number of users, with the result that everyone got a little time. This proved not to be an efficient way to address real problems. I know from my own experience what it's like to work on challenging problems when your computer time is limited.

We asked ourselves how discovery could advance if we gave people enough time to solve major problems and allocated the machine time based on peer review. We started with just four proposals, but when people found out we'd be allocating as much as a million hours or more per project, INCITE really caught on.

HPCwire: Has the program turned out as expected? Have there been any surprises or learning experiences along the way?

Dr. Orbach: INCITE has proven itself beyond any expectations we had. For 2007, nine industries were awarded time. One lesson from the program is that researchers in industry are fully on a par with researchers in universities and can have problems that are just as challenging. This was a surprise. Another surprise is that computational speeds have increased so rapidly. In 2003 when the program started, I was skeptical that we would have a petaflop machine any time soon. Now we have a shot at that at Oak Ridge by the end of the next fiscal year. Petaflop computing will make the INCITE concept even more powerful. We'll be able to do convergence on Navier-Stokes equations, for example, which I thought we'd never be able to do. The opportunities are quite remarkable.

HPCwire: What led the Council to recommend that DOE extend the program to U.S. industry in 2005?

Ms. Wince-Smith: The Council's fundamental belief is that U.S. competitiveness and the nation's ability to add high-value economic activity increasingly depend on 21st-century modeling and simulation. DOE has been a global leader in using high-end HPC systems for government missions requiring capabilities at the frontier of computing. As U.S. taxpayers, we have all invested in these HPC capabilities. The INCITE program is leveraging these investments not only to advance the nation's scientific leadership, but our industrial competitiveness and standard of living.

HPCwire: Why did you choose to collaborate with the Council for the INCITE program?

Dr. Orbach: The Council on Competitiveness brings a wealth of partners from industry that DOE would not otherwise be able to reach. We chose to collaborate with the Council in order to broaden the reach of INCITE, and that choice has proven itself time and again to be the right one. Like DOE, the Council and its members care deeply about American competitiveness. Collaboration with the Council -- particularly in the area of high performance computing -- is a natural extension of our mutual interest in American leadership in basic and applied research.

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