Red Herring: U.S. Shares Free Supercomputers

Bubbles, light, and aircraft are some of the things supercomputers will help humans learn more about after the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) handed out 95 million supercomputing hours in hopes of keeping the United States at the forefront of science research, the DOE said Monday.

The awards—given to companies as varied as DreamWorks, Boeing and Procter & Gamble, as well as numerous universities and scientists—are part of the Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program. They are aimed at reducing the time it takes to complete cutting-edge research from years or decades to weeks or months.

The program, whose awards were presented at the Council on Competitiveness in Washington, D.C., is meant to maintain the country’s scientific leadership—something that critics of the Bush administration question with controversies surrounding stem cells and global warning. More importantly, the research on supercomputers is expected to produce monetary results.

“Our scientific leadership underpins nearly every aspect of our economy, and by making these resources available to a broad range of science and engineering disciplines, we believe the resulting work will make us more competitive in the years and decades to come,” Dr. Raymond Orback, the DOE’s Under Secretary for Science, said in a statement.

Supercomputing doesn’t come cheap. In fact, according to the research firm IDC, the high performance computing, or supercomputing, market was worth $9 billion in 2005.

The winning projects work on a variety of subjects. Procter & Gamble, which won 1.1 million processor hours on the Blue Gene L at Argonne National Laboratory, is studying bubbles and suds—and not just for cleaning.

“Understanding the molecular mechanisms of bubble formation, dynamics and stability are…of interest for better fire control chemicals, chemicals for hazardous cleanup…as well as designing environmentally friendly consumer products,” the company said in its research proposal.

DreamWorks, meanwhile, believes that pushing the limits of real-time ray-tracing—that is, the modeling of the path that light takes as it interacts with a surface, which is important in developing lenses for cameras, telescopes and microscopes—will benefit more than just movie-making.

“In addition to affecting the way films are produced, the proposed real-time, high-fidelity ray-tracing techniques have applications in other fields requiring visualization of large complex datasets,” the animation company said in its proposal. DreamWorks won 900,000 processor hours on the Cray XT3 at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

To be sure, supercomputers are already being used beyond pure-science research, such as for sturdier diaper packaging. But the INCITE program will ensure that upcoming research won’t just benefit the companies and institutions conducting the experiments.

“The resulting knowledge will largely be available, so that the information and technologies can be used by other researchers, further broadening the impact of this work,” Orbach said.