CiSE publishes first issue dedicated to Leadership Computing

announcements
CiSE issue on Leadership Computing
Mike Papka
Jim Hack

Advances in Leadership Computing, the first of a two-part Computing in Science & Engineering (CiSE) Special Issue on Leadership Computing, is now available online. In two consecutive publications, this special issue will explore nine projects that are using leadership systems to expand the frontiers of their fields.

The September/October issue features five articles on topics that include simulating the Universe, enhancing the understanding of wall-bounded turbulence, devising an approach that computes the energy dispatch of electrical power grid systems under uncertainty, gleaning new insights into fusion plasma turbulence, and a recent advance in quantum-mechanical computational methods that can be used to search for optimal materials such as batteries and photo-electrochemical cells.

Full articles are available with a CiSE magazine subscription.

Advances in Leadership Computing [Guest editors' introduction]

Ten years ago, Congress enacted a research and development program to advance high-end computing, charged the US Department of Energy with its execution and oversight, and introduced the term leadership computing into our national vernacular. The act was a shrewd investment in the nation's ability to remain competitive through novel discoveries in science and engineering. The world's most powerful systems were to be the medium, the applications the means, and the research community the driver. Thus, a sustained mechanism to support all three was established.
 
Today's Leadership Computing Facility, or LCF, realized today at two centers at Argonne and Oak Ridge National Laboratories, has already deployed several generations of systems and remains the leading source of supercomputing cycles for the world's computational science community.
 
This year the LCF also saw a record 6 billion processor hours competitively awarded to project teams through its primary allocation program (called INCITE, which stands for Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment), a thousandfold increase in awarded time since the Advanced Scientific Computing Research program founded the facility a decade ago. Every one of these 59 winning projects will run on petascale systems capable of quadrillions of calculations per second.