Grand Challenge supercomputing allocations announced
"Grand Challenge" research proposals ranging from climate change, astrophysics, inertial confinement fusion, to seismic and nuclear explosion monitoring were among the 18 projects to be allocated time on Laboratory supercomputing resources under the third annual Institutional Unclassified Computing Grand Challenge Awards.
"These proposals address compelling Grand-Challenge-scale, mission-related problems that promise unprecedented discoveries in scientific and engineering fields of research, and if successful, will result in high-level recognition by the scientific community at large," said Cherry Murray, principal associate director for Science and Technology, in announcing the awards Tuesday. "As we saw earlier this year from presentations of last year’s award winners, this program enables compelling and exciting science and engineering results."
Project proposals were reviewed by both internal and external referees. Judy Kammeraad of the Science and Technology Office chaired the internal scientific review panel. Criteria used in selecting the projects included: quality of science and/or engineering; significance and impact of access to computing resources; ability to effectively utilize a high-performance, institutional computing infrastructure; quality and extent of external collaborations; and alignment with DOE/NNSA missions and the Laboratory’s S&T strategic vision. Grand Challenge projects are multi-institutional collaborations with universities and other national labs.
"The total allocation requested exceeded the computer cycles available by a factor of three and the suite of proposals was very strong," Kammeraad said. "This made the selection process challenging. The strength of the proposals and the breadth of their alignment with strategic science and engineering directions underscore how integral high-performance computing has become to the Lab’s science and technology enterprise."
Teams with winning proposals will be allocated time starting the week of May 19 on Atlas, a 44-teraFLOP (trillion floating operations per second) machine, and Thunder, a 22-teraFLOP machine — systems dedicated to unclassified research through the Laboratory’s Multi-programmatic and Institutional Computing program. A total of 84.5 million CPU hours have been allocated to these projects over the next year in two categories, Tiers 1 and 2. Tier 1 projects will receive a higher percentage of requested computer time.
Central processing unit or CPU time is measured across the multiple CPUs in a computer. For example, two CPU hours can be one CPU used for two hours or two CPUs used for one hour. High-performance computers generally consist of thousands of CPUs; the Atlas system contains 9,216 CPUs.
The Institutional Unclassified Computing Grand Challenge Awards program is now in its third year and represents the rapid growth of supercomputing resources being made available to unclassified research. Over the last 10 years, high-performance computing resources dedicated to unclassified institutional research have increased more than a thousand fold from 72 giga (72,000 million) FLOPS in 1997 to more than 80 teraFLOPS today. Additional unclassified high-performance computing resources are expected to be brought on line this year.
Listed below are the Grand Challenge proposals selected this year for initial allocations. (*continuing projects)
Principal Investigator | Tier1 - Project Title | Initial allocation (kcpu-hr/wk) |
---|---|---|
Dave Bader | Ultra-High Resolution-Coupled Climate Simulations * | 160, Atlas |
Peter Eggleton | Stellar Structure and Evolution | 160, Atlas |
Chris Marianetti | Predicting Properties of Plutonium Metal and Alloys with the Dynamical Mean-Field Theory * | 150, Atlas |
Denise Hinkel | Toward a Predictive Capability for Laser Backscatter in NIF Ignition Targets * | 165, Atlas |
John Klepeis | Impurity and Alloying Effects on Material Strength from First-Principles | 150, Atlas |
Felice Lightstone | Complete Mechanistic Understanding of Small Molecule Binding to Acetylcholinesterase and the Nicotinic Acetylcholine Receptor: Free Energy Calculations for Future Drug Design | 110, Atlas |
Meijie Tang | Strength of Micro-Sized Single Crystals — Smaller is Stronger | 140, Atlas |
Additional awardees in Tier 2 (listed alphabetically): | ||
Principal Investigator | Tier2 - Project Title | Initial allocation (kcpu-hr/wk) |
Kyle Caspersen | First-Principles Planetary Science | 60, Thunder |
Nir Goldman | First-Principles Simulations of the Reactivity of Gold Nanoparticles on TiO2 Surfaces | 60, Thunder |
James Hawreliak | Study of Ramp Compression of Metals Using Molecular Dynamic Simulations * | 50, Thunder |
Andreas Kemp | Intense Short-Pulse Laser-Plasma for Fast Ignition and Other Applications | 60, Thunder |
Jeffery Latkowski | Toward High-Fidelity Neutron Transport Analysis for Advanced Nuclear Energy Systems Utilizing Deep Burn | 50, Atlas |
Richard Law | Simulation of Membrane Protein and NLP Particles: Multi-directorate, Multi-scale Applications * | 45, Thunder |
John Moriarty | Toward Petascale Atomistic Simulations With Quantum-Level Accuracy * | 120, Atlas |
Petr Navratil | Ab Initio Nuclear Structure and Reactions With QCD | 25, Thunder |
Arthur Rodgers | Seismic Simulations to Improve Nuclear Explosion Monitoring in the Middle East | 35, Thunder |
Fred Streitz | Direct Numerical Simulation of Hot Dense Radiative Plasmas | 55, Thunder |
X. Xu | Gyrokinetic Simulations of Turbulence and Transport in Tokamak Plasmas * | 30, Thunder |