The U.S. Department of Energy's Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) program brings together the nation's top researchers to tackle challenging scientific problems by advancing computational science and developing the tools necessary to enable scientific use of the high performance computers of today and those envisioned for the next decade.  The Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research in DOE's Office of Science supports multidisciplinary SciDAC projects aimed at developing future energy sources, studying global climate change, accelerating research in designing new materials, improving environmental cleanup methods, and understanding physics from the tiniest particles to massive supernovae explosions.

The SciDAC program was initiated in 2001 as a partnership involving all SC program offices - Advanced Scientific Computing Research, Basic Energy Sciences, Biological and Environmental Research, Fusion Energy Sciences, High-Energy Physics and Nuclear Physics - to fully realize the potential of emerging petascale computers at that time for advancing scientific discovery. Researchers have achieved key scientific insights in a number of areas of National importance, yet many challenges of multi-scale, multi-disciplinary problems now facing science programs in DOE require advanced modeling and simulation capabilities on petascale computers.  A second challenge is driven by the need for capture, storage, transmission, sharing and analysis of large- scale experimental and observational data, as well as data from simulations.

Detailed information on the current portfolio can be found on the SciDAC Web Site. (http://www.scidac.gov)