Want to use a supercomputer?

The Department of Energy (DOE) said this week it is offering over 680 million supercomputer processor-hours to run advanced scientific projects on its supercomputers.

Through its sixth annual Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program, DOE’s Office of Science plans to award the supercomputer processor-hours at its labs in Berkeley, CA; Chicago, IL; Oak Ridge, TN; and Richland, WA for large-scale, computationally-intensive science projects in 2009.

INCITE encourages proposals from scientists and engineers from universities, industry and other research facilities for large-scale science projects requiring the use of high-performance computing systems not commonly available in academia or the private sector. 

The number of processor-hours expected to be awarded in 2009 is more than double the amount allocated in 2008, and is made possible by the new 550 teraflop/s (550 trillion calculations per second) IBM BlueGene P supercomputer recently installed at Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago, IL.

For 2009, the INCITE program provides the only opportunity for researchers to request allocations on the Cray XT4 supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the IBM Blue Gene supercomputer at the Argonne National Laboratory Leadership Computing Facility.  Other available computing resources are the Cray XT4 supercomputer at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Hewlett-Packard massively parallel system at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.The DOE says the term “processor-hours” refers to allocation of time on a supercomputer. 

A project receiving one million processor-hours would take 500 hours, or about 21 days, on a 2,000-processor supercomputer.  The same project performed on a single-processor desktop computer would take more than 114 years.

For more information on the call for proposals go here. 

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