HPCwire: Energy Secretary Announces $1.2B in Science Funding

The Leading Source for Global News and Information Covering the Ecosystem of High Productivity Computing

HPCwire >> Off the Wire

March 23, 2009

Energy Secretary Announces $1.2B in Science Funding

UPTON, NY, March 23 -- Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced $1.2 billion in new science funding under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act for major construction, laboratory infrastructure, and research efforts sponsored across the nation by the DOE Office of Science. Secretary Chu made the announcement during a visit to the Brookhaven National Laboratory.

"Leadership in science remains vital to America's economic prosperity, energy security, and global competitiveness," said Secretary Chu. "These projects not only provide critically needed short-term economic relief but also represent a strategic investment in our nation's future. They will create thousands of jobs and breathe new life into many local economies, while helping to accelerate new technology development, renew our scientific and engineering workforce, and modernize our nation's scientific infrastructure."

The DOE Office of Science is the steward of ten National Laboratories in eight states across the nation and constructs and operates large-scale scientific facilities such as advanced light sources and nanoscale science research centers that provide the cutting-edge tools of today's advanced energy and physical science research. Many of the Recovery Act projects are focused on these widely used National Laboratory facilities. The package also provides substantial support for both university- and National Laboratory-based researchers, working on problems in fields ranging from particle and plasma physics to biofuels, solar energy, superconductivity, solid state lighting, electricity storage and materials science, among others.

The Department is poised to move aggressively on these projects -- many already existing, some new -- to ensure maximum jobs impact and scientific payoff. At the same time, the Department has put in place controls to ensure a high level of accountability, transparency, and responsibility in the deployment of these taxpayer dollars.

Included among the approved projects are, among others:

$150 million to accelerate ongoing construction on the National Synchrotron Light Source-II at Brookhaven National Laboratory, in Upton, New York. This new, state-of-the-art high intensity light source is expected to facilitate major breakthroughs in next-generation energy technologies, materials science and biotechnology. Ultimately, it could lead to advances in battery technology and photovoltaics.
$123 million for major construction, modernization, and needed decommissioning of laboratory facilities at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), in Oak Ridge Tennessee; Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), in Berkeley, California; and Brookhaven National Laboratory.
$65 million to accelerate construction of the 12-Billion Electron Volt Upgrade of the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF) at Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (TJNAF) in Newport News, Virginia. The CEBAF upgrade will provide an international community of physicists with a cutting-edge facility for studying the basic building blocks of the visible universe. The advanced particle accelerator technology being developed for this project also has had important medical applications.
$277 million for Energy Frontier Research Centers, to be awarded on a competitive basis to universities and DOE National Laboratories across the country. These centers will accelerate the transformational basic science needed to develop plentiful and cost-effective alternative energy sources and will pursue advanced fundamental research in fields ranging from solar energy to nuclear energy systems, biofuels, geological sequestration of carbon dioxide, clean and efficient combustion, solid state lighting, superconductivity, hydrogen research, electrical energy storage, catalysis for energy, and materials under extreme conditions.
$90 million for other core research, providing support for graduate students, postdocs, and Ph.D. scientists across the nation. This will create jobs and stimulate the economy both directly -- in creating and saving research jobs -- as well as through scientific advancements that ultimately can be applied in the marketplace.
$69 million to create a national scale, prototype 100-gigabit per second data network linking research centers across the nation. This effort will enhance the Office of Science's networking capabilities and benefit the commercial telecommunications sector.
$330 million for operations and equipment at Office of Science major scientific user facilities, used annually by over 20,000 researchers. Facilities supported by Recovery Act funding include, among others, the Spallation Neutron Source at ORNL, the world's most intense pulsed accelerator-based neutron source, used in advanced materials science, chemistry, and biology research; the Nanoscale Science Research Centers, located at five National Laboratories nationwide, which provide world-leading nanotechnology instrumentation; the ARM Climate Research Facility, a collection of climate measurement facilities located around the globe that gather atmospheric data needed to reduce uncertainty about climate change; the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), which provides unique instrumentation and computational capabilities for environmental science; and the Linac Coherent Light Source, currently under construction at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (SNAL) in Menlo Park, Calif., which will enable scientists for the first time to observe chemical reactions at the molecular level in real time.
In addition, the Recovery Act funding provides $125 million for needed infrastructure improvements across nine DOE national laboratories: Ames Laboratory in Ames, Iowa; Argonne National Laboratory, in Argonne, Ill.; Brookhaven National Laboratory; Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill.; LBNL; ORNL; PNNL in Richland, Wash.; SNAL; and TJNAF.

The Department of Energy is the nation's leading sponsor of basic research in the physical sciences, with 17 national laboratories, and also supports researchers at more than 300 colleges and universities nationwide. History has shown that investments in science pay for themselves many times over.

The $1.2 billion is the first installment of a total of $1.6 billion allocated to the DOE Office of Science by Congress under the Recovery Act legislation. Officials are working on details remaining to enable approval and release of the balance of $371 million.

-----

Source: DOE

Article Tools

Share Options

(Digg, Technorati, more)

Subscribe

Subscribe to HPCwire

Discussion

There are 0 discussion items posted.

Join the Discussion

You must be a registered user in order to comment on HPCwire stories.

Members enjoy:

	Access to Special Content, including Podcasts, Webcasts, and Whitepapers and more!
	Ability to take an active role in the discussions that are shaping the HPC technology discipline!
	Special offers available only to HPCwire members!

Become a Registered User Today!

Registered Users Log in Here to Comment

Email Address:	Password (case sensitive)

Remember me	Forgot Password?

RSS Feeds

Feeds by Topic

Feeds by Industry

Feeds by Content Type

Feature Articles

The Week in Review

TACC's Ranger supercomputer celebrates its second year of enabling important research; Microsoft partners with NSF to bring cloud services to researchers; and NSF submits its fiscal year 2011 budget request. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.
Read More...

NASA Looks to Move Science Apps Into the Cloud

It seems only natural that the US space agency would be casting its eyes toward the clouds. Sure enough, NASA is now looking to cloud computing to optimize the operation of the agency's IT infrastructure for some of its science codes. Like many commercial businesses and government organizations, NASA is being asked to do more computing with fewer datacenter resources.
Read More...

Thoughts, Observations, Beliefs & Opinions About the NSF Supercomputer Centers

There is no such thing as an NSF (Supercomputer) Center and there never has been. There should be. What there are, in the words of Ed Hayes, then comptroller of NSF, are "NSF ASSISTED Supercomputer Centers." This is a double edged sword.
Read More...

Read more HPCwire features...

Top Headlines

IBM Releases Energy Efficient Power7 System

Feb 09 | eWeek Europe | Company says new high-end servers will deliver "intelligent performance." Read more...

Inductive Coupling Packs Flash Drive in a Chip

Feb 09 | EE Times | Wireless technology promises energy-efficient chip-to-chip communication. Read more...

IBM, Microsoft Help Create Montana Supercomputer

Feb 08 | eWeek | A new kind of Rocky Mountain high. Read more...

AMD Aims for GPUs in Mainstream Servers Starting 2012

Feb 08 | Computerworld | Chip maker hopes to bring CPU-GPU processors to servers in two years. Read more...

Graphene Transistors That Work at Blistering Speeds

Feb 05 | Technology Review | IBM has created graphene transistors that leave silicon ones in the dust. Read more...

Read more headlines...

Featured Whitepapers

Virtualization for Aggregation And The vSMP Architecture™

Jan 12 | | In-depth look at vSMP Foundation server virtualization technology, technical implementation, use cases and capabilities. The technical whitepaper provides an architectural overview and details on the three vSMP Foundation products: vSMP Foundation for SMP, vSMP Foundation for Cluster and vSMP Foundation for Cloud.

Copper Cable Technologies for High Performance Computing

Jan 18 | | This white paper discusses Gore’s copper cable assemblies, and how they continue to exceed the standards for providing reliable, cost-effective solutions for high-performance computer applications.

Appro Assists LLNL with Cluster Designed for Extreme Scale Visualization

Jan 11 | | LLNL is home to some of the fastest computers in the world. In 2012, LLNL expects to have the Sequoia supercomputing cluster operational with a projected performance of over 20 PFLOP/s. These systems will focus on strengthening the foundations of predictive simulation through running large suites of complex simulations and then comparing model predictions with experimental data. To visualize this project’s large amount of data, LLNL requested an Appro Supercomputing Cluster specifically designed to support interactive data analysis.

View the White Paper Library

Multimedia

Webcast: Virtualized Data Center Roundtable

Join this online panel discussion for live Q&A with leading industry experts, analysts, and end-users to discuss the latest innovations, best practices, barriers to implementation, and measurable benefits of server virtualization with a particular focus on today's real world solutions.

Webcast: Watch SC09 Birds of a Feather Video: Scalable Fault-Tolerant HPC Supercomputers

Learn about scalable fault-tolerant architectures and examples of energy efficient and scalable supercomputing clusters using dual QDR InfiniBand to combine capacity computing with network failover capabilities with the help of programming languages such as MPI and a robust Linux cluster management package.

Webcast: High Performance Computing for a Smarter Planet

LIVE@SCO9: The IBM team discusses new innovations in hardware, software and services that help clients better understand their workloads and get insight from their R&D efforts. Technology demonstrations include the soon-to-be-released Power7 HPC processor, the DCS990 system with 2.4 petabytes of storage, the xCAT management tool, secure HPC cloud computing and more. Winners of two HPCwire Readers' and Editors’ Choice Awards! Take the IBM virtual tour at SC09 or more information go online to: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/deepcomputing/sc09.html