PROGRAM SPONSORS:
Oak Ridge Associated Universities (ORAU), Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL)
BACKGROUND:
In recent years, ORNL’s commitment to providing the world’s most powerful open resource for scientific computing has resulted in an impressive computational capability in Oak Ridge, Tennessee (see section on ORNL’s HPC Resources below). ORAU is partnering with the laboratory to provide opportunities for faculty and staff to become more intimately engaged in high-performance computing through a grant program. This program would not only provide a monetary award, but more importantly, would provide valuable access to the computing resources and staff at ORNL with the goal of expanding the existing research initiatives of university faculty or creating new research areas
By the end of 2008, ORNL will deploy the Cray XT5 supercomputer, which is a 1-petaflops leadership-class system for science. By 2018, the laboratory expects to have an exaflops system in place, which would be a thousand times faster than the petaflops Cray system. The opportunities introduced with these ultrascale computing resources are revolutionizing the lab’s approaches to energy, environmental sustainability and security global research challenges.
According to Associate Laboratory Director for Computing and Computational Sciences Thomas Zacharia, the U.S. has held a dominant position in supercomputing and continuing that is “absolutely critical” not only for our scientific enterprise but critical to the U.S. sustaining a competitive edge and superiority in science and technology.
ORAU is committed to making investments in faculty-student programs for our member institutions that align with the science agenda at ORNL, specifically in areas that require the leadership-class computational resources available in the Leadership Computing Facility and the National Institute for Computational Sciences.
ORNL’S HPC RESOURCES
ORNL’s Computing and Computational Sciences Directorate (CSSD) features the following computing resources:
- Cray XT (Jaguar)— the 250+ teraflops system (http://www.nccs.org)
- ORNL Institutional Cluster (OIC)
- Kracken – National Institute for Computational Sciences (NICS)
- High Performance Storage System for software, servers and storage hardware in the NCCS
- Visualization capabilities including a large PowerWall display, a medium-sized visualization cluster and a visualization laboratory
Access to these computing resources to be used to enhance educational and research experiences for faculty and students, making scientific discovery possible in such areas as superconductivity, computational biology, climate, combustion, and astrophysics is the ORNL commitment to this program.
ORNL’S CROSS-CUTTING SCIENCE AGENDA
Strengthening ORNL’s leadership position in computing and the computational sciences is at the core of the CCSD mission ( http://computing.ornl.gov and www.jics.utk.edu/index.html). Measures of success are breakthrough contributions in science and engineering with broad impacts to U.S. scientific leadership and national security. Dramatic advances in the power and performance of computing resources, networks, and data-storage facilities are opening new pathways to the modeling and simulation of physical, chemical, and biological systems and providing new insights into a host of complex science and engineering problems in climate change impacts, biomass supply chain, energy assurance, and knowledge discovery.
PROGRAM OVERVIEW/GUIDELINES
ORAU will sponsor a series of grants to provide for meaningful faculty engagement with ORNL’s leadership computing capabilities. Proposals for cross-cutting research projects from faculty are welcomed. Opportunities exist for both students and faculty.
- Purpose:
- Provide the opportunity for faculty to create or expand collaborative research with ORNL in scientific areas of discovery requiring HPC capabilities.
- Provide ORAU member institutions the opportunity to create a strategic partnership with ORNL through alignment of faculty research with ORNL’s science agenda.
- Enhance the development of the future workforce in scientific discovery through computing by providing real-world experiences for students.
- Roles/Responsibilities:
- ORAU: Provide yearly funding for grants up to three years.
- ORNL: Provide access to HPC resources and staff collaboration on research projects.
- ORAU Member Institutions: Demonstrate institutional commitment as appropriate in support of faculty research proposed.
- Faculty-Student Teams: Propose research to be performed using ORNL’s HPC resources that
- has significant scientific merit.
- develops or expands the faculty member’s research program.
- aligns with ORNL’s cross-cutting science agenda.
- Grant Details:
- Anticipated Funding Amount: $75,000 grant—$25,000 per year—for up to three years.
- Type and Number of Grants:
- Competitive grant renewable for up to three years.
- Two grants awarded per year.
- Significant progress, as demonstrated in a report to ORAU/ORNL on research outcomes at the end of each grant year, will determine what warrants second- or third-year funding.
- Ultimately, in steady state, six awards would be in place in an individual year. Desired mix would be three awards to principal investigators experienced in the application of high-performance computing and three awards to principal investigators with a desire to become involved in high-performance computing, with one of these three grants being awarded to a historically black college or university.
- Team Eligibility Information:
- Program is open to faculty-student teams proposing research in any scientific area. The proposed research does not have to be in computer science, but rather could be research in any scientific discipline that would benefit in some way from the application of high-performance computing resources.
- Team makeup and number would be at the discretion of the faculty member, however preference would be to support a team consisting of a faculty member with a graduate or undergraduate student(s).
- Team must be from an ORAU member institution.
- Timeline:
- June 2008—Call for proposals
- September 2008—Proposals due
- October 2008—Peer review of proposals
- November 2008—Grants awarded for FY2009
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