2006 INCITE Projects

In January 2006, DOE's Office of Science awarded a total of 18.2 million hours of computing time at five supercomputing centers to 15 projects in order to tackle some of the most challenging scientific problems of our time.

The allocations of computing time are made under DOE's Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program, now in its third year of providing resources to computationally intensive research projects in the national interest. For the first time in the three-year history of INCITE, proposals from private-sector researchers were specifically encouraged. In return, much of the resulting knowledge will be made publicly available. The program was also expanded from a single supercomputing facility — NERSC at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory — to five supercomputers at four DOE labs in Berkeley, Calif.; Chicago, Ill.; Oak Ridge, Tenn.; and Richland, Wash. This allowed DOE to increase the number of grants to 15, up from three in each of the past two years.

Of the 15 projects given awards, three projects received 3.5 million hours of computing time at NERSC:

• Cameron Geddes: Particle-in-Cell Simulation of Laser Wakefield Particle Acceleration
• Michael Norman: Precision Cosmology Using the Lyman Alpha Forest
• Larry Pratt: Reactions of lithium carbenoids, lithium enolates, and mixed aggregates

• Surfing the plasma waves: Simulations are helping physicists understand how to optimize the beams in laser wakefield particle accelerators
• Under the computational microscope: Building a chemical toolbox