Release Date: January 18, 2008

Morgantown, W.Va.—The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Science announced today that a scientist at DOE’s National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) has been awarded 3 million hours of processor time to conduct advanced research on fossil fuel power plants on one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers.  http://energy.gov/news/5849.htm

The Office of Science awarded the supercomputer hours to Madhava Syamlal, a scientist at NETL, as one of 55 nationwide recipients who received a total of 265 million processor hours.  Syamlal, along with his team of co-investigators, will use the powerful Cray XT4 supercomputer at ORNL to vastly increase the speed of coal gasifier simulations to aid in the design and optimization of the power plants.  His team is composed of Thomas O’Brien (NETL), Chris Guenther (NETL), Sreekanth Pannala (ORNL), Ramanan Sankaran (ORNL), and Aytekin Gel (Aeolus Research Inc.).

"The Department of Energy's Office of Science has two of the top ten most powerful supercomputers, and using them through the INCITE program is having a transformational effect on America's scientific and economic competitiveness," DOE Under Secretary for Science Raymond L. Orbach said. "Once considered the domain of only small groups of researchers, supercomputers today are tools for discovery, driving scientific advancement across a wide range of disciplines. We're proud to provide these resources to help researchers advance scientific knowledge and understanding and thereby to provide insight into major scientific and industrial issues."

DOE’s Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program, now in its fifth year, supports the large-scale, intensive use of supercomputers to embrace some of the nation’s most vital scientific and engineering research projects.  The selected projects, based on their breakthrough potential and applicability to supercomputers, will allow researchers to conduct cutting-edge research in weeks or months rather than years.  http://www.sc.doe.gov/ascr/incite/index.html
 
The NETL research team will use an advanced computational model to address power plant scaleup by studying the effect of several operating conditions on the performance of a commercial-scale transport gasifier in DOE’s Clean Coal Power Initiative program, aimed at developing zero-emission power plants of the future.