Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) computational science projects are aimed at accelerating scientific research in designing new materials, developing future energy sources, studying global climate change, improving environmental cleanup methods and understanding physics from the tiniest particles to massive exploding stars known as supernovae.

As most of the projects funded under the initial SciDAC program have officially ended (alumni projects on this site) and the resulting success stories underscore the value of multi-disciplinary collaborations. SciDAC-1 might appear to be a very hard act to follow. But with the announcement of SciDAC-2 projects, it’s clear that The Department of Energy (DOE) and the nation’s scientific computing community are up to the task – taking scientific advance to the petascale.

Petascale computing refers to both petaflops, a million-billion calculations per second, and petabytes, a million-billion bytes of data. This level of computing power will enable researchers to study scientific problems at an unprecedented level of detail. For example, current models allow scientists to design materials with thousands of atoms, while petascale computing will allow models with millions of atoms, yielding more accurate simulations of the properties of these materials. But effectively utilizing petascale computing for scientific research poses significant challenges. The SciDAC teams bring together experts in the various scientific disciplines with computer scientists and applied mathematicians to focus on the immediate needs of the applications in overcoming the challenges of petascale computing and anticipate future challenges.

Over 350 letters of intent were received, resulting in 240 full proposals. After a month of internal review, those proposals were scrutinized during three weeks of intensive peer review panels. From there, 30 of the most promising projects, involving 70 institutions (map) and hundreds of researchers and students, were selected to be supported in the second round of SciDAC funding.

Among the reasons for the strong response for SciDAC-2 was the addition of new scientific application areas in Computational Biology and Groundwater Reactive Transport. These new efforts join projects in Physics, Climate Change, Fusion Energy, and Materials and Chemistry. Some of these efforts are partially supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and/or the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).

In support of these advanced scientific applications, SciDAC-2 will also include multidisciplinary teams to create computational technologies that overcome some of the mathematical, computer science, and networking challenges of petascale computing.

SciDAC-2 is establishing nine Centers for Enabling Technologies to focus on specific challenges in petascale computing. These multidisciplinary teams are led by national laboratories and universities and focus on meeting the specific needs of SciDAC science applications researchers as they move toward petascale computing. The centers will specialize in applied mathematics, computer science, distributed computing or visualization, and will be closely tied to specific science application teams.

SciDAC-2 will also increase the presence of the program in the academic community by creating four university-led SciDAC Institutes with thirteen participating universities. Through hands-on workshops and tutorials, the SciDAC Institutes will help a broad range of researchers prepare their applications to take advantage of the increasing capabilities of supercomputing centers around the country, as well as help foster the next generation of computational scientists.

All SciDAC teams will be developing specific websites for their projects and links to those websites will be added to the program pages as they become available. Researchers from industry, academia and laboratories can also get information and advice from the SciDAC Outreach Center.

Together the SciDAC-2 teams will strive to match or exceed the advances that were realized through SciDAC-1 while broadening both the community of practitioners and the areas of scientific application.