June 29, 2022 — Today, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced that 18 million node-hours have been awarded to 45 scientific projects under the Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) Leadership Computing Challenge (ALCC) program. The projects, with applications ranging from advanced energy systems to climate change to cancer research, will use DOE supercomputers to uncover unique insights about scientific problems that would otherwise be impossible to solve using experimental approaches.

The 2022 ALCC allocation cycle will debut a new system and testbed: Perlmutter at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) and Polaris at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF). It will also provide early-access to a few select projects on Frontier at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF)—the first exascale computer and the fastest computer in the world. Projects will also have access to DOE’s broader constellation of advanced computing systems: Summit at OLCF, Theta at ALCF, and Cori at NERSC. The selected projects will receive computational time on one or more of these systems to conduct breakthrough research that requires the nation’s most powerful supercomputers.

“Department of Energy supercomputers, which are ushering in the exascale era, provide world-leading scientific tools that advance U.S. science. Our supercomputers enable exploring scientific problems in new ways, safely and quickly modeling experiments that would otherwise be too dangerous, large, or costly,” said Barb Helland, DOE Associate Director for Advanced Scientific Computing Research. “These ALCC awards enable researchers across the Nation to use our supercomputers to advance our global scientific competitiveness, accelerate clean energy options, and better understand and mitigate the impacts of climate change.”

The ASCR Leadership Computing Challenge (ALCC) program supports efforts to broaden community access to DOE’s computing facilities with an emphasis on high-risk, high-payoff simulations relevant to the DOE mission. The 2022 awardees, including 7 new users, were awarded compute time at DOE’s high-performance computing facilities at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, as well as at NERSC at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. Of the 45 projects, 3 are interagency-collaborations, 3 are from industry, 17 are led by universities, and 22 are led by national laboratories. Learn more about the projects on the Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research website.

These projects span a wide range of research areas addressing national challenges, such as:

• Climate change, including improving climate models to better understand climate change and future extreme weather events, simulating the carbon cycle, machine learning for water-system science, and modeling seismic events.
• Energy, including AI and deep learning prediction for fusion energy systems, modeling materials for energy storage, studying wind turbine mechanics, and designing new semiconductors.
• Medicine, such as deep learning for medical natural language processing, modeling cancer screening strategies, and AI for cancer image processing.

Finally, early access to DOE’s new exascale computer, Frontier, will further advance clean energy, through an award to GE for turbomachine simulations, and the Cancer Moonshot, through two awards to efforts under the Joint Design of Advanced Computing Solutions for Cancer—a collaboration between the National Cancer Institute and DOE.

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Source: DOE Office of Science