The Department of Energy is one of the world’s leading users of high-performance computers.  The world’s most powerful supercomputer, Blue Gene/L, is located at DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and is being used to simulate the performance, safety, and reliability of nuclear weapons and to certify their functionality.

DOE has seven other high performance computing systems in the world’s top 25 the world in performance.  They are located at DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

The DOE Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) Program, part of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) Stockpile Stewardship Program, funds fundamental and applied research and development in high performance computing, to support the broad nuclear security mission through leading edge science-based, computational science. NNSA must assure confidence in the nuclear stockpile, now and in the future, and the computational science activities in ASC are a key part of that mission.

ASC has led the nation and the world in the development and application of tera-scale computing and advanced architectures, including ASCI Red, the world's first Teraflop computing platform, and Blue Gene/L (360 Teraflops), the first platform to break the 100 \Teraflop limit. As a world leader in large scale cluster computing, ASC has helped to foster the emergence of a new commercial market in commodity and advanced cluster architectures for the science, engineering, and information sectors.

The ASC Program focus on the development and integration of predictive science capabilities for stockpile transformation requires a balanced portfolio of activities.  These include development and validation of fundamental physics and engineering models and codes, deployment of the next generation of Peta-scale platforms, and sponsorship of the supporting computer science to meet the unique capability and capacity computing needs of stockpile stewardship.

The ASC Academic Alliances Program is a strategic component of the overall ASC Program that brings computational scientists from NNSA Defense Programs National Laboratories (Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, and Sandia) together with researchers from a spectrum of leading academic institutions. These collaborations focus on fundamental problems in integrated, multi-scale computational physics to accelerate the development, integration and validation of simulation-based predictive science capabilities for complex, multi-disciplinary problems of national and global interest.

The DOE Office of Science, through its Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) Program, supports fundamental research in applied mathematics, computer science, and networking – and provides world-class high performance computational networking tools that enable DOE to succeed in its science, energy, environmental remediation, and national security missions.

This program includes the Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) Program, which is a set of coordinated investments in all Office of Science mission areas with the goal of achieving breakthrough scientific advances through computer simulation that were impossible using theoretical or laboratory studies alone.  The program also includes the  Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program, which provides computing resources and consulting support for a small number of computationally intensive large-scale research projects that make high-impact scientific advances through the use of a substantial allocation of computer time and data storage at DOE high performance computing centers.

DOE laboratories that provide high performance computing for these programs are located at DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory.  A major expansion of high performance computing capacity is underway within this program, with new and expanded systems being delivered over the next few years with performance in the Petaflop range.

Last Updated: 9/7/2007