DOE awards 18 million HPC node hours to 45 ASCR projects, including access to Perlmutter, Polaris and Frontier

June 29, 2022 – Today, the United States Department of Energy (DOE) announced that 18 million node hours have been awarded to 45 science 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 with the aim of discovering insights about scientific problems that would otherwise be impossible to solve using experimental approaches.

For information about the projects go to the Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research website†

These projects cover 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 systems science and modeling seismic events.
• Energy, including AI and deep learning prediction for fusion energy systemsmodeling materials for energy storagestudying wind turbine mechanics and designing new semiconductors.
• Medicine, such as deep learning for natural language medical processing, modeling of cancer screening strategies, and AI for cancer image processing.

The 2022 ALCC Allocation Cycle introduces 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 also provides early access to a few select projects on Frontier at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), the world’s first exascale computer and the fastest computer in the world† Projects will also have access to DOE’s wider constellation of advanced computing systems: Summit at OLCF, Theta at ALCF and Cori at NERSC. The selected projects will be run on one or more of these systems to conduct groundbreaking research that requires the nation’s most powerful supercomputers.

“The Department of Energy’s supercomputers, ushering in the exascale era, provide industry-leading scientific tools that advance American science. Our supercomputers enable new ways to explore scientific problems, safely and quickly modeling experiments that would otherwise be too dangerous, large or expensive,” said Barb Helland, DOE Associate Director for Advanced Scientific Computing Research. “These ALCC awards enable researchers across the country to use our supercomputers to increase 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-payout simulations relevant to the DOE mission. The 2022 winners, including 7 new users, were given computing 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.

Finally, early access to DOE’s new exascale computer, Frontier, will further promote clean energy, through a price to GE for turbomachinery simulations, and the Lobster Moonshotthrough two awards for efforts under the Joint Design of Advanced Computing Solutions for Cancer – a collaboration between the National Cancer Institute and DOE.