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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:

  • 10 percent of the IBM Power computer 3 at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing (NERSC) Center ;
  • 10 percent of the IBM BlueGene computer at Argonne National Laboratory;
  • 10 percent of the Leadership-Class Cray X1E and XT3 computers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory; and
  • 5 percent of the Hewlett Packard MPP system at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

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.

Thank you.