Exascale and Beyond: DOE Funds $12M for Adapting Software for Next-Gen Supercomputers

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The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today announced plans to provide up to $12 million for research aimed at adapting scientific software to run on next-generation of supercomputers.

DOE said applications will be open to DOE national laboratories, universities, industry, and nonprofit research institutions.  Funding is to be awarded competitively, on the basis of peer review, and is expected to be in the form of three-year awards.

Planned funding is up to $12 million for three-year awards beginning in FY2021, pending congressional appropriations.

More information on the DOE funding opportunity, “X-Stack: Programming Environments For Scientific Computing,” issued by the Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) within DOE’s Office of Science, can be found here.

The research will focus on two areas:  developing approaches to updating scientific applications for the new parallel-programming environments of the coming generation of systems; and developing new methods of testing scientific applications to ensure they function properly on new systems and new features are added to the software.

DOE said the goal is to decrease the effort necessary to transition software to next-generation platforms, helping unlock the full potential of both the scientific software and the new computing platforms.

“The coming generation of supercomputers, as we move through and beyond the era of exascale computing, will bring a huge boost in capabilities for scientific investigation and discovery,” said Dr. Steve Binkley, Acting Director of DOE’s Office of Science. “Taking advantage of these capabilities will require adaptation to radically new computing architectures and programming environments.  This research seeks to tackle these challenges in very systematic ways.”