Driven by rapid technological advances within the past two decades, computing and high-speed networking have emerged as powerful tools for science and are even changing the ways in which modern science is conducted. DOE is a national leader in the scientific computing field–supporting fundamental research in advanced scientific computing, applied mathematics, computer science, and networking. The DOE computational infrastructure provides world-class, high-performance computational and networking tools that enable scientific, energy, environmental, and national security research.

More than 2400 scientists in universities, federal agencies, and U.S. companies use DOE-funded high-performance computers. Research communities that benefit from these resources include structural biology; superconductor technology; medical research and technology development; materials, chemical and plasma sciences; high energy and nuclear physics; and environmental and atmospheric research.

Among DOE’s most important computing resources are the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) in Berkeley, California, and numerous Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) (formerly Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI)) centers. NERSC provides high-performance computing, information, and communications services making possible computational science of scale, in which large, interdisciplinary teams of scientists attack fundamental problems in science and engineering that require massive calculations and have broad scientific and economic impacts. Examples of these problems include global climate modeling, combustion modeling, and computational biology. ASC centers harness computational power to provide new means of assessing the performance of nuclear weapon systems, predicting their safety and reliability, and certifying their functionality. Critical to ASC is the construction of a new generation of supercomputers–up to 100 teraflops in size--to be built over several years.

DOE's Scientific Discovery by Advanced Computation (SciDAC) computing research program is working to develop the Scientific Computing Software and Hardware Infrastructure needed to use terascale computers to advance its research programs in basic energy sciences, biological and environmental research, fusion energy sciences, and high-energy and nuclear physics. (http://science.energy.gov/ascr/research/scidac).

Related Topics:
Advanced Scientific Computing Initiative (ASCI), bioremediation, computational modeling and simulation, energy technologies, Energy Sciences Network (Esnet), Genomes to Life, high performance computing, microbial research, National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), Oak Ridge National Laboratory Center for Computational Science, Scientific Discovery by Advanced Computation (SciDAC), scientific computing

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