ALCC Program Announces 2021–2022 OLCF Research Grants

The US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) is tasked with leading the world in supercomputing, high-end computational science, and advanced networking for science. One of its most important tools in advancing computational science is the annual ASCR Leadership Computing Challenge (ALCC). The competitive program grants 1-year allotments of high-performance computing (HPC) time to scientists from industry, academia, and national laboratories whose work advances scientific and technological research in DOE mission areas, such as fusion energy, geosciences, high energy physics, and materials sciences.

The ALCC allocates up to 30 percent of the HPC resources at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF)—a DOE Office of Science user facility located at the DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL)—and at Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, as well as up to 10 percent at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

This year, 20 research teams have been awarded a combined 7,008,000 node hours on the Summit supercomputer, the OLCF’s 200 petaflop IBM AC922 system and the nation’s most powerful and smartest scientific supercomputer. Their projects will investigate everything from the effects of off-shore wind phenomena on wind farms to improving cancer detection through deep learning approaches.

Here are the 2021—2022 ALCC projects that have been granted compute time on Summit.

• Harsh Bhatia, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), received 740,000 node hours for “AI Directed Adaptive Multiscale Simulations to Model RAS-RAF Cancer Initiation Pathway on Curved Membranes.”
• Thomas Blum, University of Connecticut, received 610,000 node hours for “Hadronic Contributions to the Muon G-2 from Lattice QCD Using Chiral Fermions.”
• Sanjeeb Bose, Cascade Technologies Inc., received 100,000 node hours for “Achieving Higher Efficiency Turbomachinery Design via Large Eddy Simulation.”
• Carleton DeTar, University of Utah, received 300,000 node hours for “Precision Calculation of the Anomalous Magnetic Moment of the Muon with Highly Improved Staggered Quarks.”
• Vikram Gavini, University of Michigan (UM), received 130,000 node hours for “First Principles Calculations of Dislocation Core Energetics in Dilute Mg Alloys.”
• Rafael Gomez-Bombarelli, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Department of Materials Science and Engineering, received 50,000 node hours for “Inverse Design of Multicomponent Oxide Catalysts with Generative Models and DFT.”
• John Gounley, ORNL, received 130,000 node hours for “Next-Generation Scalable Deep Learning for Medical Natural Language Processing.”
• Walter Hannah, LLNL, received 150,000 node hours for “Improving Shallow Clouds in a Multiscale Earth System Model.”
• Eric Johnsen, UM, received 4,000 node hours for “Cavitation Dynamics in the Spallation Neutron Source Target.”
• Jing Li, GE Research, received 240,000 node hours for “Characterizing Coastal Low-Level Jets and Their Impact on Offshore Wind Farms.”
• Elia Merzari, Pennsylvania State University, received 250,000 node hours for “High-Fidelity Flow Data for Multiscale Bridging.”
• Amy Nicholson, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, received 300,000 node hours for “Electromagnetic Corrections to Strong Dynamics.”
• Joseph Oefelein, Georgia Institute of Technology, received 600,000 node hours for “Investigation of Compressibility and Nonequilibrium Turbulence in Reacting Flows.”
• Michal Osusky, GE Research, received 256,000 node hours for “Applying Machine Learning to Reynolds Number Impact on High Pressure Turbine Flow.”
• Balasubramaniam Radhakrishnan, ORNL, received 1,250,000 node hours for “Design of Novel Titanium Based Alloys for Additive Manufacturing Using HPC-Aided Large-Scale Phase Field Simulations.”
• Dillon Shaver, Argonne National Laboratory, received 80,000 node hours for “High-Fidelity CFD Simulations Supporting the Needs of Industry and the DOE.”
• Ashley Shields, ORNL, received 368,000 node hours for “Informing Forensics Investigations of Nuclear Materials.”
• Jeffrey Skolnick, Georgia Tech Research Corporation, received 50,000 node hours for “Breaking the Gene Annotation Bottleneck with Structure-Based Machine Learning.”
• Lucas Wagner, University of Illinois, received 300,000 node hours for “QMC-HAMM: From the Nanoscale to the Mesoscale.”
• Brian D. Wirth, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, received 1,100,000 node hours for “Plasma Surface Interactions Modeling.”

UT-Battelle LLC manages Oak Ridge National Laboratory for DOE’s Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. DOE’s Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit https://energy.gov/science.