Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing

The fastest computers in the United States have
their work cut out.

Forrest M. Hoffman

Friday, May 11th, 2007

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This column often focuses on the nitty-gritty details of building and operating Linux clusters, or concentrates on parallel programming languages and techniques. This month, though, let’s take a step back to get a broader view of the computational science applications being designed and run on the world’s largest, fastest, and most-powerful supercomputers. The recent announcement of new computational science projects from the U.S. Department of Energy offers a flavor of the kinds of” grand challenge” research of national and international importance being performed on these great machines.

Bling!

On September 7th, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced $60 million in new research projects in its Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) program. Created to bring together the nation’s top researchers to develop new computational methods, the SciDAC Program is aimed at tackling some of the most challenging scientific problems of our time, including accelerating the design of new materials, developing future energy sources, studying global climate change, improving environmental cleanup methods, and understanding and modeling physics from the quantum to the astronomical scale.

The SciDAC program was launched in 2001 with the goal of developing scientific applications to effectively utilize the terascale supercomputers (machines capable of performing trillions of calculations per second) becoming available at that time. Widely hailed as a success, SciDAC-1 projects helped scientists make important discoveries using high performance computing (HPC) in many scientific areas.

*Astrophysicists for the first time created fully resolved simulations of the turbulent nuclear combustion in Type 1a supernovae, improving…

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