The challenge of building the most powerful supercomputers in history is one thing. Developing complex scientific applications large enough to run on them is another.
Starting January 12, through March 16, 2026, researchers will have the opportunity to apply to be the first users on the Discovery supercomputer, arriving in 2028 at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Discovery will play a key role in the Genesis Mission — DOE’s bold new endeavor to build the world’s most powerful scientific platform to accelerate discovery science, strengthen national security, and drive energy innovation.
“We’re excited that Discovery will not only continue ORNL’s and DOE’s proven record of HPC leadership, but it will also support the Genesis Mission’s scientific productivity goals,” said Arjun Shankar, director of the OLCF and the National Center for Computational Sciences at ORNL.
Information and instructions for submitting applications are available at OLCF’s Discovery Center for Application Readiness (CAAR) — Call For Proposals website.
“Our goal is to run applications on day one that will effectively show us how Discovery will help address some of the biggest scientific challenges that are beyond the computing capabilities of previous machines,” said Reuben Budiardja, CAAR program lead and ORNL group leader for Advanced Computing for Nuclear, Particle and Astrophysics.
Applications will be evaluated based on potential for scientific advancements, usefulness to the broader scientific community, and contribution to programing models, algorithms, AI and other innovations to further science and technology.
Two key requirements include submitting an acceleration plan demonstrating at least a fivefold performance improvement over applications currently running on Frontier and similar exascale systems, as well as instantiating a compelling challenge problem to be performed on Discovery.
“The CAAR program is an ideal venue for exploring different computational techniques, for example, the pros and cons of using lower precision and mixed precision calculations to see which approach makes the best use of the chips,” Budiardja said. “That’s one way we can better exploit Discovery’s hardware that not only maintains fidelity for the science, but also achieves better performance for the application.”
Because Discovery will be used to study a wide range of scientific problems, from drug discovery to nuclear fuels and the origins of the universe, Budiardja hopes to see a broad range of CAAR applications that represent the entire scientific community.
“Part of CAAR’s mission is to broaden the availability of high-performance computing (HPC) and AI so that more people can benefit. We want to invite teams from different areas of science and with different levels of computing experience to apply,” Budiardja said. “You don’t have to be a user on Frontier who’s already fully utilized GPUs. Even applications that have had issues with GPU-acceleration and scalability should apply, and we can help their teams overcome those challenges.”
In addition to being granted early access to Discovery, accepted projects will have access to special training sessions, hackathons and direct assistance from OLCF staff for code porting, profiling and optimization, as well as support from staff at AMD and Hewlett Packard Enterprises via the ORNL HPE/AMD Center of Excellence. They will also be given compute-time allocations on Frontier and on other early hardware resources.
Discovery is a key component in ORNL’s work on the DOE Genesis Mission, as it will continue to advance breakthroughs in AI-enabled high-performance modeling and simulation, as well as exploring potential computing paradigms involving the convergence of HPC, AI and quantum computing.
“CAAR is an essential piece of the Genesis Mission because it will mark the first use of Discovery in generating data sets for AI training,” said Bronson Messer, the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility’s director of science. “The lessons learned as part of CAAR for Discovery will be important for any subsequent use of the machine and for the entire Genesis Mission platform.”
Application decisions will be announced during the first week of May 2026.
An information webinar will be held on January 23, 2026. Interested participants may register at Webinar Registration. Questions about the CAAR call for proposals can be sent to [email protected].
Frontier and Discovery are managed by the OLCF, a DOE Office of Science user facility at ORNL.
UT-Battelle manages ORNL 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 energy.gov/science.
