Argonne National Laboratory

Article | Mathematics and Computer Science

MCS Division researchers awarded INCITE supercomputing time to enable scientific breakthroughs
Two researchers in the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne lead projects that have been awarded a total of 185 million hours of computing time on the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) leadership-class computing facilities.

Using the computer allotments, the researchers will conduct advanced simulation and analysis and will develop scalable system software needed to fully utilize the power of leadership-class computing facilities.    

The projects, selected competitively based on their potential to advance scientific discovery, were awarded the supercomputer time through the DOE Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program.

  • Salman Habib, a senior physicist and computational scientist and member of Argonne’s High Energy Physics and MCS Divisions, will continue his work on state-of-the-art simulations to predict the formation of structure in the universe. The new project, to be carried out on both the Argonne Blue Gene/Q ​“Mira”  (80 million processor hours) and the Oak Ridge Cray XK7 (80 million processor hours), will accurately characterize key quantities of the universe’s geometry, such as spatial statistics of the distribution of mass and the sum of neutrino masses and how they impact cosmic evolution and structure formation
  • Robert Latham, a principal software development specialist, was awarded 25 million processor hours on the Blue Gene/Q to continue his study of scalable system software for parallel programming. Latham will lead a team of MCS Division researchers in evaluating future exascale designs through the performance of million-node simulations of network topologies

MCS Division researchers will also participate in two other INCITE projects. One of the projects is new, and the other is a renewal.

  • Robert Jacob will work with colleagues from several other national laboratories in cutting-edge climate science research. The new project—awarded 50 million processor hours on the Cray XK7 and 140 million processor hours on Mira—will pursue grand challenge science questions about the water cycle and cryosphere systems and quantify the benefits of high resolution on the simulated climate. The research is part of the Accelerated Climate Modeling for Energy (ACME) project.
  • Pete Beckman will continue development of a Performance Evaluation and Analysis Consortium (PEAC) end station. His focus in on development of new runtime systems for emerging and future-generation leadership computing platforms that exploit thread-level parallelism and potential architectural heterogeneity. The project, led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, will use both the Argonne Mira (45 million processor hours) and the Cray XK7 (45 million processor hours).

The INCITE program was established by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science a decade ago to support computationally intensive, large-scale research projects leading to transformational scientific discoveries.