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July
31, 2003
INCITE Program to Allocate Major Department of
Energy Office of Science Computing Resources to
Key Scientific Projects
Proposals Now Being Accepted
WASHINGTON, DC — Proposals are now being
accepted for a new Department of Energy (DOE)
Office of Science program to support innovative,
large-scale computational science projects, Secretary
of Energy Spencer Abraham announced today.
The program, entitled Innovative and Novel Computational
Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE), will
award a total of 4.5 million supercomputer processor
hours and 100 trillion bytes of data storage space
at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing
(NERSC) Center at DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley
National Laboratory. The NERSC Center is the Office
of Science’s flagship facility for unclassified
supercomputing.
The program seeks computationally intensive large-scale
research projects, with no requirement of current
Department of Energy sponsorship, that can make
high-impact scientific advances through the use
of a substantial allocation of computer time and
data storage at the NERSC Center. The INCITE program
specifically encourages proposals from universities
and other research institutions. A small number
of large awards is anticipated.
“The capabilities of terascale computing
are transforming the conduct of science, bringing
scientific simulation through computational modeling
to parity with theory and experiment as a scientific
tool,” Energy Secretary Abraham said. “The
INCITE initiative will make Lawrence Berkeley’s
NERSC facility available to all qualified researchers
for grand challenge calculations – and in
the process bring us closer to achieving the full
potential of scientific simulation to solve outstanding
scientific and industrial problems of major significance.”
“The power of advanced scientific computation
is just beginning to be realized, Dr.
Raymond L. Orbach, Director of DOE’s Office
of Science said. “For some promising research
efforts, there simply have not been enough cycles
or there wasn’t an infrastructure which
would allow large-scale simulations to truly develop
and produce the kind of discoveries we hope to
achieve.”
Recognizing this, the Office of Science decided
that 10 percent of NERSC’s IBM supercomputer
– now at 10 Teraflop/s, or 10 trillion operations
per second – should be made available for
grand challenge calculations.
“We are launching the INCITE initiative
for two reasons,” Dr. Orbach explained.
“For one, it’s the right thing to
do: there are opportunities for major accomplishments
in this field of science. In addition, there is
also a ‘sociology’ that we need to
develop. We need to learn how to function at those
speeds, how to work together as teams, and how
to handle and manipulate data.”
“We will open NERSC’s computational
facilities to everyone,” Dr. Orbach said.
“Ten percent of NERSC’s capability
will be available to the entire world. Prospective
users will not have to have a DOE contract, or
grant, or connection. The applications will be
peer reviewed, and will be judged solely on their
scientific merit. It may be the case that teams
rather than individuals will be involved. It even
is possible that one research proposal will be
so compelling that the entire 10 percent of NERSC
will be allocated to that one research question.”
“We need to get scientific teams –
the people who are involved in algorithms, the
computer scientists, and the mathematicians –
together to make the most efficient use of these
facilities,” Dr. Orbach said. “That’s
what this opening up at NERSC is meant to do.
We want to develop the community of researchers
within the United States – and frankly around
the world – that can take advantage of these
machines and produce the results that will invigorate
and revolutionize their fields of study.”
Successful INCITE proposals will describe high-impact
scientific research and will be peer reviewed
both in the area of research and also for general
scientific review comparing them with proposals
in other disciplines. Applicants must also present
evidence that they can effectively use a major
fraction of the 6,656 processors of the IBM SP
supercomputer at the NERSC Center, which is the
most powerful computer for unclassified research
in the United States. Applicant codes must be
demonstrably ready to run in a massively parallel
manner on that computer.
Proposals will be accepted only electronically,
following instructions found in the Call for Proposals
at http://hpcf.nersc.gov/accounts/allocations/incite.html.
Proposals will be accepted until 5:00 pm PDT on
Sunday, September 21, 2003. Awards are expected
to be announced by October 31, and access to the
NERSC facilities for the awardees will be established
immediately following the announcement and remain
in effect untilOctober 1, 2004.
DOE’s Office of Science is the single largest
supporter of basic research in the physical sciences
in the nation and ensures U.S.world leadership
across a broad range of scientific disciplines.
For more information about the Office of Science,
go tohttp://www.science.doe.gov.
The NERSC Center currently serves more than 2,000
scientists at national laboratories and universities
across the country researching problems in combustion,
climate modeling, fusion energy, materials science,
physics, chemistry and computational biology.
Established in 1974, the NERSC Center has long
been a leader in providing systems, services and
expertise to advance computational science. For
more information about the NERSC Center, go to
http://www.nersc.gov.
Media Contact(s):
Jeff Sherwood, 202/586-5806
Jon Bashor, 510/486-5849
Number: R-03-171
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