Remarks by Dr.
Raymond L. Orbach
Director, Office of Science
U.S. Department of Energy
at the NNSA Advanced Simulation and Computing
Program
Purple and BlueGene/L Dedication Ceremony
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Livermore, CA
October 27, 2005
Thank you, Bruce
[Goodwin, Livermore Associate Director of
Defense and Nuclear Technologies].
Today marks another
important milestone in the Office of Science
and NNSA partnership to revitalize the U.S
effort in high-end computing. Over the past
15 years, NNSA and the Office of Science have
leveraged resources in the areas of operating
systems, systems software and on advanced
computer evaluations to the benefit of both
organizations.
Typically, NNSA
has led the way in developing novel new massively
parallel processing computer systems based
on commodity processors, while the Office
of Science has been a pioneer in applying
these new generation architectures to important
environmental and scientific challenges.
Together, the NNSA
and Office of Science high performance computing
programs serve the Department of Energy’s
mission – to advance U.S. energy, economic
and national security – new energy technologies,
scientific discovery, and simulating and predicting
the behavior of nuclear weapons.
The Advanced Simulation
and Computing Program (ASC) Purple and BlueGene/L
machines we are dedicating here today at Livermore
are the latest in an increasingly sophisticated
suite of supercomputers across the DOE complex.
The ASC program
is integral to the Department of Energy’s
defense strategic goal of protecting our national
security by applying advanced science and
nuclear technology to the Nation’s defense.
Meanwhile, in the
Office of Science, we are working to deliver
an UltraScale Scientific Computing Capability,
located at multiple sites that will increase
by a factor of 100 the computing capability
available to support open scientific research.
We laid out our
vision for leadership-class computing in Facilities
for the Future of Science: A Twenty-Year Outlook,
which the Secretary of Energy released in
November 2003.
We now are hard
at work searching for architectural configurations
that will deliver the greatest efficiency
for solving scientific problems and simulating
complex systems essential for industrial competitiveness
through virtual prototypes.
To this end, the
Office of Science launched a new program in
2003 to allocate large portions of our computing
resources to key scientific challenges, demonstrating
that simulation is the third pillar supporting
scientific discovery, along with experiment
and theory.
We call it the
INCITE program, for “Innovative and
Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment.”
The program includes use of fast computer
capability, as opposed to capacity, for large
applications in aerospace, automotive engineering,
biotechnology, chemistry, energy, and physics.
Recent accomplishments
include detailed three-dimensional combustion
simulations of flames, providing new insight
into reducing pollutants (at Sandia National
Laboratories/California); astrophysics simulations
of the forces that help newly born stars and
black holes increase in size (University of
Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory);
and protein simulations designed to advance
scientists' knowledge about the function of
proteins and their use in drug design (University
of Washington).
INCITE offers an
exciting path to petascale computing, providing
a way for researchers to explore challenging
applications on machines that are going to
define the future of science.
In this, the INCITE
initiative’s third year, we are making
five Office of Science computers at four national
laboratories available to qualified researchers
at universities and national laboratories
and in industry for grand challenge calculations.
Through the INCITE
program, scientists may apply for allocations
of up to:
In addition, through
a Memorandum of Understanding with Argonne,
IBM is making available approximately 18 million
processor hours on the IBM BlueGene/W installed
at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown
Heights, New York. We sincerely appreciate this
IBM support of the INCITE program.
Stay tuned: the Office
of Science will be announcing the INCITE program’s
third-year project awards in the next few weeks.
The diversity of
computational platforms employed by NNSA and
the Office of Science provide computational
architectures that cover the full spectrum of
scientific applications. This in turn provides
the DOE, and the entire scientific community,
with opportunities available in no other country.
It is an essential part of the DOE fabric, working
towards the betterment of the scientific and
commercial communities in the U.S.
