14 DAY TRIAL // The Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program is apparently one of the most promising such endeavors in the United States today. As part of it, for 2010, the US Department of Energy (DOE) has alloted more than 1.6 billion supercomputing hours on its machines to about 69 cutting-edge research initiatives. The major advantage that research teams involved in INCITE have over other groups is the fact that the simulations and models they construct take just days or weeks to become reality, rather than years or decades. All of this is due to the state-of-the-art machines that the DOE has funded and helped create over the past few years.
Up until now, some of the research fields that stood most to gain from this initiative have included climate change, alternative energy, life sciences, and materials science. Aspects related to all of these, and many more, have ran on the Department's supercomputers, and helped advance our understanding of the world around us considerably. As the technology associated with these advanced machines progresses, we could expect to see even more innovation stemming from the INCITE program, and other similar initiatives in the United States and abroad.
“Computation and supercomputing are critical to solving some of our greatest scientific challenges. This year's INCITE awards reflect the enormous growth in demand for complex modeling and simulation capabilities, which are essential to improving our economic prosperity and global competitiveness,” the US Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu, says. He adds that all of the 69 projects were selected after a careful peer review of their potential to significantly advance scientific knowledge and benefit a large number of people or businesses.
According to official documents, all the selected investigations will take place at the DOE Leadership Computing Facilities, located at the Argonne National Laboratory, in Illinois, and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in Tennessee. Lithium-air batteries and nanoscale solar cells are just two of the technologies that will be modeled on the supercomputers at these research facilities. The main categories that the 69 projects for 2010 belong to include energy, biology, the environment, and climate change.