The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program is now accepting proposals for high-impact, computationally intensive research campaigns in a broad array of science, engineering, and computer science domains. Proposals must be submitted by June 15, 2026.
Open to researchers from academia, government labs, and industry, the INCITE program is the major means by which the scientific community gains access to the most capable, most productive, fastest open science supercomputers in the nation. The program aims to accelerate scientific discoveries and technological innovations by awarding, on a competitive basis, time on supercomputers to researchers with large-scale projects that address “grand challenges” in science and engineering.
INCITE is currently soliciting research proposals for awards on the exascale supercomputers at DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) for calendar year 2027. The program allocates up to 60 percent of available node-hours on the Aurora exascale system at Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) and the Frontier exascale system at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility. The ALCF and OLCF are DOE Office of Science user facilities.
“INCITE gives researchers access to the nation’s most powerful supercomputers for open science, enabling projects that would not be possible anywhere else,” said Michael Papka, director of the ALCF and deputy associate laboratory director for Computing, Environment, and Life Sciences (CELS) at Argonne. “From modeling complex materials and energy technologies to advancing large-scale AI applications, these computing resources help teams tackle some of today’s most challenging problems in science and engineering.”
“The insights made possible by extreme-scale computing continue to surpass expectations, and we’re excited to see a new crop of researchers take advantage of these powerful tools for discovery,” said ORNL’s Arjun Shankar, director of the National Center for Computational Sciences, which oversees the OLCF. “The INCITE program provides researchers with the necessary means to break through barriers to understanding and innovation via these remarkable computational resources.”
Successful proposals must demonstrate a clear need for and the ability to harness leadership-class computing resources and will align with the program’s goal of advancing scientific discovery and technological innovation. INCITE encourages applications from diverse disciplines, including astrophysics, biology, chemistry, earth sciences, and more.
As of 2022, INCITE is committing 10% of allocatable time to an Early Career Track. The goal of the Early Career Track is to encourage the next generation of high-performance computing researchers. Researchers within ten years from earning their PhD (PhD on or after December 31, 2016) and who have not been a previous INCITE PI may choose to apply.
Information about the Early Career Track can be found at https://www.doeleadershipcomputing.org/early-career-track/.
For information on the INCITE Program, visit http://www.doeleadershipcomputing.org/.
The 2026 INCITE Call for Proposals can be found at http://www.doeleadershipcomputing.org/proposal/call-for-proposals/.
You may address specific questions to the INCITE Manager, Mark Berrill at [email protected].
INCITE Proposal Writing Webinars
To help you prepare an INCITE proposal or to learn more about the program, two INCITE Proposal Writing Webinars will be offered on April 21, 2026, from 10 a.m. – 12 p.m. EST, and May 5, 2026 from 2 – 4 p.m. EST. The two-hour webinar will also include discussion on the Director’s Discretionary Program, a way to request early access to port, tune, and scale your codes in preparation for an INCITE application.
For more details and early registration for either of these events, see http://www.doeleadershipcomputing.org/proposal/informational-webinars/.
Early Access
Director’s Discretionary requests for access to Frontier and Aurora can be submitted any time. Director Authors often use this access to generate benchmarking data in preparation for the INCITE call for proposals.
See http://www.doeleadershipcomputing.org/about/ for links to the Director’s Discretionary programs at the ALCF and the OLCF.
