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Originally appeared in Monday, September 11, 2006 Oak Ridger

ORNL researchers winners of five DOE SciDAC awards


Oak Ridge National Laboratory has the lead on five projects funded through the Department of Energy's Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing program, and has supporting roles in seven other projects.

SciDAC, begun in 2001, is an integrated program that will help create a new generation of scientific simulation computer programs. The programs will take full advantage of the extraordinary computing capabilities of computers capable of performing trillions of calculations per second to address increasingly complex problems.

The 30 SciDAC-2 computational science projects will receive a total of $60 million over the next three to five years to advance fundamental research in several areas related to the department's missions, including climate modeling, fusion energy sciences, chemical sciences, nuclear astrophysics, high-energy physics and high-performance computing.

"ORNL researchers will play a key role in supporting the SciDAC mission, leading five SciDAC projects and partnering in more than seven others," said Associate Lab Director Tomas Zacharia. "SciDAC represents a commitment to propel simulation science to petascale computing and new discoveries. I am pleased that ORNL is well represented in supporting DOE in advancing frontiers of science."

ORNL's awards were for the following projects:

• A Scalable and Extensible Earth System Model for Climate Change Science. The award is for $4.8 million per year for five years for a team led by John Drake of the Computer Science and Mathematics Division. The goal of this project is to transform an existing, state-of-the-science third generation global climate model, the Community Climate System Model, to create a first generation Earth system model that fully simulates the coupling between the physical, chemical, and biogeochemical processes in the climate system.

• Performance Engineering for the Next Generation Community Climate Model System. This three-year $500,000 per year project is an auxiliary to the project led by Drake and to a five-year, $3 million per year computer science project led by the University of Southern California. Goals of the project, led by Patrick Worley of the Computer Science and Mathematics Division, are to improve the computer performance of the Community Climate System Model on existing computer systems and to ready the model for efficient execution on next-generation massively parallel systems.

• Steady State Gyrokinetic Transport Code, headed by Mark Fahey of the Center for Computational Sciences. This $240,000 per year three-year project focuses on developing calculations describing the physics of fusion reactors.

• Advanced Mathematics for Electronic Structure, a $300,000 per year three-year project headed by George Fann of the Computer Science and Mathematics Division. Fann and colleague Robert Harrison are developing multi-resolution fast and scalable models for high-precision computational chemistry computations.

• Center for Technology for Advanced Scientific Component Software, a $3 million per year five-year project headed by David Bernholdt of the Computer Science and Mathematics Division. This project continues DOE's investment in the development of component software technology for high-performance scientific computing begun in the first round of the SciDAC program.

Additional information about the SciDAC projects, along with descriptions of the Institutes, Centers for Enabling Technology and Science Applications, can be found at www.scidac.gov.

UT-Battelle manages Oak Ridge National Laboratory for the Department of Energy.

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