DOE Awards 157 Million Supercomputing Hours to Four Berkeley Lab Researchers

Four Berkeley Lab researchers have been awarded a total of 157 million processor hours through the U.S. Department of Energy’s 2016 ASCR Leadership Computing Challenge (ALCC).

The Advanced Scientific Computing Research program, which manages the ALCC, announced 49 ALCC awards in all for 2016, totaling 3 billion processor hours. The supercomputing allocations will be delivered across three DOE Office of Science user facilities: Berkeley Lab’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility and the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing facility.

The four Berkeley Lab researchers are:

• Peter Nugent, who received 51 million processor hours for “High Performance Computing for Manufacturing”
• Kristin Persson, who received 36 million processor hours for “The Materials Project - Completing the Space of Elastic and Piezoelectric Tensors”
• David Trebotich, who received 40 million processor hours for “Chombo-Crunch:  Modeling Pore Scale Reactive Transport Processes Associated with Carbon Sequestration”
• Lin-Wang Wang, who received 30 million processor hours for “Large scale electronic structure calculations of nanosystems”

Each year, the ALCC provides awards of computing time ranging from a few million to several-hundred-million core hours to researchers from industry, academia and government agencies. Chosen through a peer review process, ALCC projects cover a range of research areas—including energy efficiency, renewable energy, physics, climate modeling and materials science—with an emphasis on high-risk, high-payoff simulations in areas directly related to the DOE mission.

The one-year awards began July 1. Additional projects may be announced at a later date, as ALCC proposals can be submitted throughout the year.

Click here to see a full list of the 2016 awardees.