DOE Announces Supercomputer Partnerships with Universities
With the Administration’s decision to end nuclear testing, the Department of Energy, as the guardian of the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile, must rely on computer modeling and simulation to certify the weapons’ safety and reliability. At its weapons labs, DOE has the most powerful computer in the world, and two even faster ones under construction, and now needs to develop skills and techniques for using this computing power to maintain the stockpile. Noting that developing “an unprecedented level of simulation capability requires strategic alliances with leading research organizations,” DOE has turned to the universities.
After a rigorous competition, five universities were selected to participate in DOE’s Academic Strategic Alliances Program (ASAP). Under this 10-year, $250 million program, the universities will be given access to approximately 10 percent of the time on the Department’s three most powerful computers. In announcing the awards on July 31, Energy Secretary Federico Pena said this initiative would create “a revolution in how science is conducted in the U.S.” The program will “change the way scientists solve complex problems,” he said, while making progress toward developing the simulations necessary to maintain the stockpile and producing people with the needed expertise.
According to DOE, the participating universities will “focus on one or more national-scale multi-disciplinary applications” in non-classified areas in which computer modeling and simulation would advance not only the state of knowledge in that area, but also prove useful to the stockpile stewardship effort. The universities will be Centers of Excellence, DOE says, which will “accelerate advances in solving key science and engineering applications of national importance while validating high-confidence simulation as a crucial scientific methodology.”
The University of Chicago has proposed a Center for Astrophysics that will help “unlock the mysteries of many of the most significant problems in astrophysics,” such as “how massive stars explode as supernovas,” said university Vice President David Schramm. Vice President and Provost Steve Koonin of the California Institute of Technology explained that his university will partner with other institutions to develop a computational facility for modeling the response of materials to intense shockwaves. Michael Aiken, Chancellor of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, described his university’s proposal to study advanced solid propellant rockets, which will “contribute to a better understanding of ignition and shock physics.” Stanford University’s center, said Dean John Hennessey, will focus on computational fluid dynamics and turbulence related to gas turbine engines. The University of Utah center will simulate accidental fires and explosions, said President Jerilyn McIntyre; the research will benefit not only the stockpile stewardship effort, but also the aerospace, chemical and petroleum industries.
The program will have “enormous private-sector applications,” Pena asserted, as supercomputers become more readily available to industry. “The high-end machines today will be mid-range tomorrow,” noted Stanford’s Hennessey. Los Alamos National Laboratory Director Siegfried Hecker added that the strategic program will encourage scientists and industry to “think differently about how to tackle problems.”
