Secretary Chu makes ready for $1.2B spending spree in DOE

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Secretary of Energy Stephen Chu has announced plans to spend $1.2B of the $1.6B aimed at the DOE Office of Science by  the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Nothing specifically about supercomputing, but I did spot a networking item and a facilities item that could impact HPC facilities in the DOE (though this isn’t clear from the announcement, which I cribbed from HPCwire)

$69 million to create a national scale, prototype 100-gigabit per second data network linking research centers across the nation. This effort will enhance the Office of Science’s networking capabilities and benefit the commercial telecommunications sector.

…In addition, the Recovery Act funding provides $125 million for needed infrastructure improvements across nine DOE national laboratories: Ames Laboratory in Ames, Iowa; Argonne National Laboratory, in Argonne, Ill.; Brookhaven National Laboratory; Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill.; LBNL; ORNL; PNNL in Richland, Wash.; SNAL; and TJNAF.

Also, news that the department will be investing directly in science through expanded sponsorship of research

$90 million for other core research, providing support for graduate students, postdocs, and Ph.D. scientists across the nation. This will create jobs and stimulate the economy both directly — in creating and saving research jobs — as well as through scientific advancements that ultimately can be applied in the marketplace.