Sept. 16 — Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) is collaborating with Lawrence Livermore and Oak Ridge national laboratories to lead a new Department of Energy (DOE) program designed to fund and foster public-private R&D projects that enhance U.S. competitiveness in clean energy manufacturing.
The High Performance Computing for Manufacturing Program (HPC4Mfg), announced this week during the third annual American Energy and Manufacturing Competitiveness Summit (AEMC), couples U.S. manufacturers with the labs’ world-class computational research and development expertise to address key challenges in U.S. manufacturing. Through the program, the DOE will initially make up to $3 million available for qualified industry partners. The selected projects will apply modeling, simulation and data analysis to industrial products and processes to lower production costs and shorten the time to market for new products.
The HPC4Mfg program is part of the DOE’s Clean Energy Manufacturing Initiative (CEMI), launched three years ago to strengthen U.S. competitiveness in the production of clean energy products and boost U.S. manufacturing competitiveness across the board by increasing energy productivity.
The two-day AEMC summit, sponsored by the Council on Competitiveness and the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, brings together DOE officials, national lab leaders and top U.S. manufacturing CEOs to discuss critical energy and manufacturing challenges and opportunities affecting U.S. prosperity, sustainability and security. Among those attending this year is Peter Nugent, Division Deputy for Scientific Engagement in Berkeley Lab’s Computational Research Division (CRD), and David Skinner, who leads the Strategic Partnerships effort at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC).
“The HPC4mfg collaborations will address key challenges in U.S. manufacturing through the application of modeling, simulation and data analysis to the manufacturing of materials,” Nugent said. “The goals are to improve decision making, optimize design, improve quality, predict performance and failure, quicken testing and shorten the time to adopt new technologies.”
For example, one of the early projects to be funded through the new HPC4mfg initiative involves the pulp and paper industry’s Agenda2020 Technology Alliance, which among other things is looking at ways to reduce the amount of energy consumed in the papermaking process and develop a more sustainable approach for manufacturing pulp and paper products. The Alliance will work with CRD’s David Trebotich and other computational researchers from Berkeley and Livermore labs to simulate the dewatering and rewetting operations in papermaking and develop a computational modeling framework that incorporates improved physics and conceptual formulations to accurately simulate the flow of moisture to and from the porous pulp medium during the pressing process in paper making.
Skinner, who has spent the past year connecting a number of industry partners with supercomputing resources at NERSC, gave a presentation on some of those projects at the AEMC summit. So far in 2015, NERSC has added nine new private-sector partners in energy-specific fields ranging from semiconductor manufacturing to geothermal modeling, and several have already begun using their allocations to enhance product and technology development.
“NERSC has been working with industry partners through the DOE’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant program for many years,” Skinner said, noting that since 2011 industry researchers have been awarded 40 million hours at NERSC via the SBIR program. “There is a great breadth of industry innovation already underway at NERSC; we have some 130 industry users from 50 companies. The new HPC4Mfg program will allow us to grow the impact of HPC in clean energy technologies. This is an exciting opportunity to get the same HPC capabilities well known to discovery science in the hands of companies designing and deploying clean energy solutions.”
About Berkeley Lab Computing Sciences
The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) Computing Sciences organization provides the computing and networking resources and expertise critical to advancing the Department of Energy’s research missions: developing new energy sources, improving energy efficiency, developing new materials and increasing our understanding of ourselves, our world and our universe. ESnet, the Energy Sciences Network, provides the high-bandwidth, reliable connections that link scientists at 40 DOE research sites to each other and to experimental facilities and supercomputing centers around the country. The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) powers the discoveries of 6,000 scientists at national laboratories and universities, including those at Berkeley Lab’s Computational Research Division (CRD). CRD conducts research and development in mathematical modeling and simulation, algorithm design, data storage, management and analysis, computer system architecture and high-performance software implementation.
About Berkeley Lab
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory addresses the world’s most urgent scientific challenges by advancing sustainable energy, protecting human health, creating new materials, and revealing the origin and fate of the universe. Founded in 1931, Berkeley Lab’s scientific expertise has been recognized with 13 Nobel prizes. The University of California manages Berkeley Lab for the DOE’s Office of Science. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time.
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Source: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory