Two Iowa State research groups awarded processor time on super computers

The U.S. Department of Energy has awarded computation time on super computers to two Iowa State research groups through the DOE's INCITE (Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment) program.

A group led by Iowa State physicist James Vary received 43 million processor hours at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tennessee, and Argonne National Laboratory, Illinois. Co-investigators include ISU physics research associate Pieter Maris.

Another group, led by chemist Theresa Windus, has received 10 million processor hours at Argonne National Lab. Among the co-investigators are, from Iowa State, Mark Gordon and Michael Schmidt, chemistry; Monica Lamm, chemical and biological engineering; and Brett Bode, electrical and computer engineering.

The DOE awarded processor time to 57 research projects using computer simulations to perform virtual experiments. Many of the new and continuing INCITE projects aim to further renewable energy solutions and understand the environmental impacts of energy use.

The DOE is awarding time on two of the world's fastest and most powerful supercomputers – the Cray XT5 ("Jaguar") at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the IBM Blue Gene/P ("Intrepid") at Argonne National Laboratory. Jaguar's computational capacity is roughly equivalent to 109,000 laptops all working together to solve the same problem. Intrepid is roughly equivalent to 26,000 laptops.

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