The U.S. Department of Energy’s ASCR Leadership Computing Challenge (ALCC) has awarded 24 projects a total of 1.7 billion core-hours at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF), a DOE Office of Science User Facility.

Each year, the ALCC program selects projects with an emphasis on high-risk, high-payoff simulations in areas directly related to the DOE mission and for broadening the community of researchers capable of using leadership computing resources.

Managed by DOE’s ASCR (Advanced Scientific Computing Research) program, ALCC provides one-year awards that range from a few million to several-hundred-million core-hours to researchers from industry, academia, and government agencies. Chosen through a peer review process, ALCC projects cover a wide range of research areas, including energy efficiency, renewable energy, physics, climate modeling, and materials science.

In addition to ALCF, allocations of computing time are also awarded at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) and NERSC at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The 2015 ALCC awards include 43 projects totaling more than 3 billion core-hours across the three ASCR facilities. Additional projects may be announced at a later date as ALCC proposals can be submitted throughout the year.

Below is a summary of the 24 projects awarded time at the ALCF. Some projects received additional computing time at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and/or NERSC.

• Elias Balaras, George Washington University, received 34 million core-hours for “High-Fidelity Computations of Fuel Assemblies Subjected to Seismic Loads.”
• Abhinav Bhatele, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, received 20.1 million core-hours for “Performance Analysis, Modeling and Scaling of HPC Applications and Tools.”
• Kaushik Bhattacharya, California Institute of Technology, received 20 million core-hours for “Large-Scale Ab-Initio Simulation of Crystalline Defects in Mg-Alloys.”
• Thomas Blum, University of Connecticut, received 175 million core-hours for “Hadronic Light-by-Light Scattering Contribution to the Muon Anomalous Magnetic Moment from Lattice QCD with Chiral Fermions.”
• Gerbrand Ceder, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, received 70 million core-hours for “Revealing the Reversible Electrodeposition Mechanism in Multivalent-Ion Batteries.”
• Hanning Chen, George Washington University, received 16 million core-hours for “PT-Symmetric Quantum Mechanics for Real-Time Electron Transport Simulations.”
• Robert A. DiStasio, Princeton University, received 175 million core-hours for “Anomalous Density Properties and Ion Solvation in Liquid Water: A Path-Integral Ab Initio Study.”
• Milorad Dzodzo, Westinghouse, received 40 million core-hours for “Large Eddy Simulation and Direct Numerical Simulation of Fluid Induced Loads on Reactor Vessel Internals.”
• Aytekin Gel, ALPEMI, received 111.5 million core-hours for “Credible Predictive Simulation Capabilities for Advanced Clean Energy Technology Development through Uncertainty Quantification.”
• William George, National Institute of Standards and Technology, received 50 million core-hours for “Computational Design of Novel Multiscale Concrete Rheometers.”
• Marco Govoni, University of Chicago, received 75 million core-hours for “First Principles Large-Scale Simulations of Interfaces for Energy Conversion and Storage.”
• Salman Habib, Argonne National Laboratory, received 65 million core-hours for “ALCC: Cosmic Frontier Computational End-Station.”
• Jacob King, Tech-X Corporation, received 40 million core-hours for “Validation Simulations of Macroscopic Burning-Plasma Dynamics.”
• Thomas LeCompte, Argonne National Laboratory, received 62 million core-hours for “An End-Station for Intensity and Energy Frontier Experiments and Calculations.”
• Gustavo Ledezma, General Electric, received 6 million core-hours for “Large-Eddy Simulation of Turbine Internal Cooling Passages.”
• Noa Marom, Tulane University, received 100 million core-hours for “Computational Design of Interfaces for Photovoltaics.”
• Elia Merzari, Argonne National Laboratory, received 72 million core-hours for “Toward a Longer-Life Core: Thermal-Hydraulic CFD Simulations of Deformed Fuel Assemblies.”
• Joe Olson, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, received 15 million core-hours for “Validation of RAP/HRRR for the Wind Forecast Improvement Project II.”
• J. Ilja Siepmann, University of Minnesota, received 120 million core-hours for “Predictive Modeling of Functional Nanoporous Materials.”
• Sibendu Som, Argonne National Laboratory, received 60 million core-hours for “Advancing Internal Combustion Engine Simulations using Sensitivity Analysis.”
• Tjerk Straatsma, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, received 60 million core-hours for “Portable Application Development for Next Generation Supercomputer Architectures.”
• Peter Thornton, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, received 110 million core-hours for “Delivering the Department of Energy’s Next-Generation High Resolution Earth System Model.”
• Robert Voigt, Leidos Inc., received 127 million core-hours for “Demonstration of the Scalability of Programming Environments By Simulating Multi-Scale Applications.”
• Brian Wirth, University of Tennessee, received 80 million core-hours for “Understanding Helium-Hydrogen Plasma Mediated Tungsten Surface Response to Predict Fusion Plasma Facing Component Performance in ITER.”