HPC4Mfg Program Seeking New Project Proposals

The fifth HPC4Mfg program solicitation round, which opened February 1, is seeking concept papers that spur the use of national lab supercomputing resources and expertise to advance innovation in clean energy technology. A total of up to $3 million is available to support a portfolio of projects with national impact on energy efficiency.

Established by the Department of Energy (DOE) in 2015, HPC4Mfg is designed to create an ecosystem that allows experts at DOE national labs to work directly with U.S. manufacturers to teach them how to adopt or advance their use of HPC to address challenging problems in manufacturing. The program gives participants access to world-class supercomputers and scientific expertise at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which leads the program; Lawrence Berkeley, Oak Ridge, Argonne and Sandia national laboratories; NREL; and NETL.

In this round, the HPC4Mfg program is soliciting proposals in the following primary areas:

1. Proposals that require HPC modeling and simulation to overcome impactful manufacturing process challenges, resulting in reduced energy consumption and/or increased productivity.
2. Proposals that uniquely exploit HPC modeling and simulation to reduce energy consumption through improved clean energy technology design and clean energy manufacturing.

Eligibility for this program is limited to entities that manufacture products in the U.S. for commercial applications and the organizations that support them. Selected demonstration projects will be awarded up to $300,000 to support compute cycles and work performed by the national lab partners. The industry partner must provide a participant contribution of at least 20% of the DOE funding for the project.

The program will also consider follow-on projects to previously awarded, successful demonstration projects. These projects should focus on the further implementation of the demonstrated HPC application in the industrial setting; taking it closer to operational use and broad national impact. Selected follow-on projects will be awarded up to $300,000 to support compute cycles and work performed by the national lab partners. The industry partner must provide a participant contribution of at least 50% of the DOE funding for the project; of this, at least half should be in cash to support the national laboratory work.

Concept papers are due March 15, 2018. Full proposals are due in mid-June.

Click here for more information, including links to the proposal template and other forms.