ORAU, ORNL announce winners of high-performance computing grant competition

Oak Ridge Associated Universities and Oak Ridge National Laboratory have partnered again to award two new grants in the ORAU/ORNL High-Performance Computing Grant Program for 2013.

ORAU provides up to $75,000 over three years to researchers and their teams. In addition to the monetary award, ORNL provides faculty and student teams with valuable access to the laboratory’s computing resources and staff.

For the second year, in an effort to fill research gaps and address possible project opportunities, each proposal was required to address one key research area identified by ORNL. Member institutions that submit a proposal will collaborate with an ORNL research staff member, who will serve as the principal investigator on the project. The ORNL staff members, partnered with each HPC grant winner, represent the laboratory’s Neutron Sciences and Exascale Computing organizations.

Two recipients and four ORNL principal investigators were chosen this year:

• Andrew Christlieb—Michigan State University, Department of Mathematics. The ORNL principal investigators are Cory Hauk and Jun Jia in Computer Science and Mathematics Division.
• Jens Meiler—Vanderbilt University, Department of Chemistry. The ORNL principal investigators are Hugh O’Neill in the Biology and Soft Matter Division and Loukas Petridis in the Biosciences Division.

“The HPC grant program gives ORAU the unique opportunity to pair top researchers with the most powerful high-performance computers in the world,” said Andy Page, ORAU president and chief executive officer. “Through this partnership with ORNL, we invest in our nation’s researchers and continue to advance tomorrow’s science and technology leaders.”

The grant program was established in 2009 to encourage new and expand existing research initiatives among ORAU member institutions using high-performance computing systems.

ORNL has two of the world’s fastest supercomputers and recently completed the transformation of Jaguar into a new petascale supercomputer named Titan. Titan is the fastest supercomputer in the United States and is capable of 10 to 20 thousand trillion calculations per second.

The grant award is $25,000 for the first year, with potential funding of up to two more years, for a total of $75,000 provided by ORAU. Successful proposals were evaluated on the scientific and strategic value to an ORNL Laboratory Directed Research and Development funded project.

The ORAU/ORNL High-Performing Computing Grant program is a competitive grant program managed and funded by ORAU and open only to ORAU’s member institutions. The next call for proposals is expected to be announced in the fall of 2013 and winners will be announced in the spring of 2014.