Energy awards $28M to 5 supercomputing projects
The Department of Energy will give $28 million to five research projects developing software for its supercomputers, the Scientific Discovery Through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) program announced Friday.
The projects DOE selected will develop computational methods, algorithms and software benefitting research into quantum information science and chemical reactions with clean energy applications.
SciDAC brings together interdisciplinary groups of experts to make use of DOE’s high-performance computing resources, and the five teams will partner with one or both of its institutes, FASTMath and RAPIDS2, out of the Lawrence Berkeley and Argonne national laboratories.
“DOE’s national labs are home to some of the world’s fastest supercomputers, and with more advanced software programs we can fully harness the power of these supercomputers to make breakthrough discoveries and solve the world’s hardest to crack problems,” said Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm in an announcement. “These investments will help sustain U.S. leadership in science, accelerate basic research in energy, and advance solutions to the nation’s clean energy priorities.”
The five awardees are:
- California Institute of Technology for its project on traversing the “death valley” separating short and long times in non-equilibrium quantum dynamical simulations of real materials;
- Florida State University for its project on relativistic quantum dynamics in the non-equilibrium regime;
- Lawrence Berkeley National Lab for its project on large-scale algorithms and software for modeling chemical reactivity in complex systems;
- University of California-Santa Barbara for its project on real-time dynamics of driven correlated electrons in quantum materials; and
- University of California-Riverside for its Data-driven Exascale Control of Optically Driven Excitations (DECODE) project dealing with chemical and material systems.
The projects were chosen through a competitive, peer review process under a DOE Funding Opportunity Announcement open to universities, national labs and other research organizations. DOE has yet to negotiate final project details for the awardees, but $7 million of the total funding has been allocated for fiscal 2021, contingent upon congressional appropriations.
