Researchers from the RAND Corporation and LLNL have joined forces to combine HPC with innovative public policy analysis to improve planning for particularly complex issues such as water resource management. By using supercomputer simulations, the participants were able to customize and speed up the analysis guiding the deliberations of decision makers. “In the latest workshop we performed and evaluated about 60,000 simulations over lunch. What would have taken about 14 days of continuous computations in 2012 was completed in 45 mins — about 500 times faster,” said Ed Balkovich, senior information scientist at the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit research organization.