ALCC Issues Call for Proposals

Jan. 14 — The mission of the ASCR Leadership Computing Challenge (ALCC) is to provide an allocation program for projects of interest to the Department of Energy (DOE) with an emphasis on high-risk, high-payoff simulations in areas directly related to the DOE mission and for broadening the community of researchers capable of using leadership computing resources.

Call for Proposals

Proposals for 2014 ALCC are due by 11:59 PM EST February 3rd, 2014. Please submit your proposal to the following email address: [email protected]. Proposals undergo peer review and awards will be announced in May 2014. Allocations begin July 01, 2014.

ALCC supports projects that advance the DOE mission and further the goals of DOE program offices. For 2014 ALCC, projects of special interest to the DOE include the following:

Energy efficiency and the clean energy agenda
Mesoscale materials science
Nuclear reactor safety and environmental management of nuclear waste
Advancing a robust predictive understanding and capability across scales and systems for Earth’s climate and environment
Broadening the community of researchers capable of using leadership computing resources
Exploration of new frontiers in physical, biological, and computational science

New guidelines are posted this year. Please see ALCC Application Details before submission.

Overview of ALCC

Open to scientists from the research community in industry, academia, and national laboratories, the ALCC program allocates up to 30% of the computational resources at ASCR’s supercomputing facilities. ASCR supercomputing facilities include NERSC at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Leadership Computing Facilities at Argonne and Oak Ridge National Laboratories. These resources represent some of the world’s fastest and most powerful supercomputers.

ALCC is one of several allocation programs for ASCR supercomputing facilities (see ASCR Allocation Policy) and supports our efforts to further DOE mission science and to broaden community access to leadership computing facilities. To fulfill its goal of broadening community access, ALCC supports a wide range of project allocation sizes and allocates time across all three ASCR supercomputing facilities.

ALCC grants one year awards. In 2013, 39 ALCC awards were granted, amounting to 1.8 billion processor hours with project sizes ranging from 3 to 250 million process hours. Scientific discovery advanced by ALCC allocations range across the DOE mission space include (but not limited to) energy efficiency, computer science, climate modeling, materials science, bioenergy, and basic research. (See ALCC Past Awards and Awardees).

ALCC allocates high performance computing time on the primary HPC machines at each ASCR facility. For a description of the computing resources at ASCR facilities, please see: