Call for big ideas

A total of 4.5 million supercomputing processing hours and 100 trillion bytes of data storage space on the most powerful computer for unclassified research in the United States is now up for grabs. The US Department of Energy's (DOE) Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program is inviting research proposals from scientists worldwide.The DOE's Office of Science is making 10% of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing (NERSC) Center's 10-teraflop (trillion floating point operations per second) computer available for "grand challenge" calculations. Named Seaborg, the NERSC Center's IBM SP RS/6000 machine at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory was, as of June 2003, ranked number five among the world's top 500 supercomputers. "Building these big computers only makes sense if you have really big computation projects to make use of them," said NERSC Director Horst Simon. "We're looking for someone with new ideas who's been waiting for these resources. It could have a really big payoff."INCITE seeks computationally intensive, large-scale, high-impact research projects in any scientific disciple, whether in the life sciences, the physical sciences, climate research, mathematics, chemistry or environmental science. No current DOE contract, grant, or connection is required. "We don't expect any applications from industry, but if anyone from the commercial sector is interested in publishable research, it's open," Simon said. He added that INCITE should probably become an annual set of awards. "In a general sense, I always found the scientific community has had insufficient amounts of computing time available over the years," said Joel Tohline, an astrophysicist at Louisiana State University. "The National Science Foundation has been the only organization that has made supercomputing available to the general community. I've had contacts at Department of Defense and Department of Energy labs, and occasionally we've been able to squeak out some resources from those agencies, though it's always haphazard," he said. "I applaud anything like this from the Department of Energy to support computing across the entire community."Proposals will be evaluated on both scientific and computational merit and should be sufficient for peer review both in the area of research and for general comparison with proposals in other disciplines. Applicants must also present evidence that they can use a major fraction of Seaborg's 6656 processors effectively. Volunteers must be ready to demonstrate their codes running in a massively parallel manner on the computer. "They must demonstrate they really know how to use supercomputers. It's not for novices," Simon said.A small number of large awards are anticipated. Simon doesn't want to fall into the trap "into which big centers always fall, to make a large number of allocations [of processor hours] that are fairly small," he explained. "My guess right now is on the order of three... But it could just be one for all of it."Proposals will be accepted until 2 p.m. EST on Sunday, September 21, 2003. They will only be accepted electronically, following instructions in a call for proposals on the NERSC Web site. DOE expects to announce the awards by October 31, with access to the NERSC facilities established immediately afterwards.So far, Simon said that he has received six inquiries, all of which he found outstanding, although none were for life science research. "I think actually, when it comes to life sciences in terms of using high-end platforms, they are not yet as mature as other disciplines, when compared to chemistry or material sciences. They have not developed enough software or infrastructure yet. But that might change," he said.

Call for big ideas

Researchers invited to bid for time on one of the world's top five supercomputers

Interested in reading more?

Become a Member of