Supercomputers Viewed as Tool to Save Energy

Super-fast computers are one weapon in the nation’s arsenal for fending off rising energy costs, according to many experts. The Energy Department is requesting $340.2 million—a sharp increase over the $236 million expected to be appropriated for fiscal 2007—for its supercomputing programs in the fiscal 2008 budget. The increase would partly go toward upgrading computing resources at Oak Ridge National Laboratory to make the facility the world’s largest civilian high performance computing system.

Observers do not foresee controversy over the passage of funding for supercomputing. Since 2004, Oak Ridge has provided industry and academic researchers millions of hours of supercomputing time to solve problems in physics, chemistry, genetics and energy. Among those who have used the laboratory’s supercomputers is Pratt & Whitney. The aircraft engine maker was allocated computer time in 2006 to simulate aircraft engine combustor models for improving emissions and energy efficiency.

Thom Dunning, director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, said supercomputing is “not a technology that will push just one activity forward, but it will push many activities forward,” from tweaking the design of fusion devices to understanding the basic science of solar, hydrogen and geothermal power. “The major problem we have [with] solar energy is that our efficiency in converting solar to electric just isn’t high enough,” he said.

Deborah L. Wince-Smith, president of the Council on Competitiveness, pointed to one dramatic boon that supercomputing gave the energy sector last year. Chevron and partners used high performance computing to discover an oil field in the Gulf of Mexico that could boost U.S. reserves by up to half, according to council officials. Recent advances in the precision of computer imaging allowed scientists to zoom in on a reserve that had been invisible in the past. “They got a huge return,” Wince-Smith said. Across all energy industries, “the greatest excitement” over supercomputing is the ability to view the economic costs and tradeoffs of different energy portfolios by predicting efficiencies, sustainability and money savings, she said.

“(Energy’s Undersecretary for Science) Ray Orbach has worked hard to strongly couple industry with access to high-performance computing,” said Dan Reed, chairman of the Computing Research Association and vice chancellor for information technology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The supercomputer access granted by Oak Ridge “will certainly shorten” the horizon between research and real-world deployment, he said. Payback will arrive in 18 months to three years, much sooner than basic research’s typical five- to 10-year payout. “Given the huge economic pressure that, for example, the U.S. automobile manufacturers are under,” computers that allow them to more quickly design energy-efficient car exteriors and interior engines “make them more competitive,” Reed said.