January 13, 2026 — The Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) is accepting proposals until March 16 for Center for Accelerated Application Readiness (CAAR) partnership projects to prepare modeling and simulation, data-intensive, workflow, and AI applications for highly effective use on the OLCF system to be named Discovery that will arrive in 2028.
Applications will be accepted starting January 12, 2026 through March 16, 2026. To submit a proposal, please complete the proposal form located at CAAR Proposal Form. Questions about this call should be sent to DiscoveryCAAR@ornl.gov.
Applications with limited GPU-acceleration capabilities and/or limited scalability are also invited to apply.
An information webinar for this call will be held on January 23, 2026 at 1PM EST. Interested participants may register for the webinar at webinar registration. A recording of the webinar will be posted here after the event.
Resources Available to Teams
The accepted projects will have access to the following resources:
- Direct OLCF assistance with code profiling, optimization, and porting to Discovery. This includes OLCF staff and postdocs.
- Support from the ORNL HPE / AMD Center of Excellence staff
- Allocation of compute resources on Frontier and early hardware resources
- Early access to Discovery
- Training sessions and hackathons
Selected teams will be responsible for:
- Providing a challenge problem that they intend to perform on Discovery
- Formulating a Figure of Merit (FOM), measuring the FOM on Frontier, and providing an acceleration plan to achieve at least 5X improvements on Discovery
- Designating a point of contact for their code team (committing a recommended minimum of 0.5 Full-Time Equivalent (FTE) of effort per year on CAAR and related accelerator focused application-performance activities)
- Producing mid-project reports (subject to review)
- Producing a final report detailing the challenge problem and FOM results on Discovery
- Signing a non-disclosure agreement at the start of the CAAR project
Submissions will be evaluated on:
- Potential for scientific advancements
- Potential for transfer of improvements to broader community
- Commitment from team (FTEs, etc)
- Quality of challenge problem, FOM, and acceleration plan
- Contribution to the landscape of programing models, algorithms, and field of science
Applications will be accepted starting January 12, 2026 through March 16, 2026. To submit a proposal, please complete the proposal form located at CAAR Proposal Form.
Decisions will be announced in the first week of May 2026, in time for teams to make arrangements to attend the CAAR Kick-Off Workshop to be held in the first week of June 2026.
