National Center for Computational Sciences

Inspiration is great, but sometimes a researcher needs raw computing power—the digital equivalent of a three-stage rocket engine blasting into the sky—to achieve a scientific breakthrough. But booking time on the world’s fastest computers isn’t easy. That’s why the U.S. Department of Energy, owner of two of the world’s top 10 fastest computers, is giving away time on seven machines at several of their sites, including the ranking supercomputers at Lawrence Livermore National Lab in California and Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee.

The DOE recently awarded 265 million processor-hours to 55 scientific projects ranging from climate change to fusion power. For a sense of scale, a project receiving 1 million hours could run on 1000 processors for 1000 hours, taking about 41 days. Running the same million-hour project on a dual-processor desktop computer would take more than 57 years. This is the fifth year the DOE has opened its supercomputers to the scientific community. And the program is expanding; this year’s processor-hours triple last year’s awards. “Access to supercomputers speeds up innovation,” says Barbara Helland, the manager of the program. “One team doing climate research was able to run a 100-year model in three days instead of many months.”

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