Collaborative Supercomputing
Sep 12th, 2008 in News
The big news in the science community this week was the kickoff of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), The $10 billion atom smasher that sent its first proton beams through the device’s 17-mile underground tunnel in Switzerland and France. These initial tests were the culmination of 15 years of planning and development that brought together 80 countries and thousands of individual researchers around the world. While it remains to be seen what scientific discoveries will eventually result from the LHC experiments, there is no doubt it represents the biggest and most ambitious global science project today.
Today, though, I’m going to talk about another set of science community partnerships, although these have received much less attention from the press. For the past seven years, the U.S Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Science has opened the doors to its terascale supercomputers and changed the way many U.S. scientists are doing cutting-edge research. Through the SciDAC and INCITE programs, the Office of Science has expanded the high-end computing capabilities of the agency, while spreading supercomputing talent and hardware resources across the broader research community.
In most cases, these collaborations were confined to U.S.-based science, but in others cases, the DOE partnered with researchers from around the world. In fact, the DOE (along with the NSF) invested $531 million in the aforementioned LHC project and helped design and build the ATLAS and CMS detectors through two of its labs — Brookhaven in New York and Fermilab in Illinois.
Continue reading at HPCwire.com.
