U.S. to allocate supercomputer processing

WASHINGTON, May 16 (UPI) -- The U.S. Department of Energy is inviting proposals for innovative, large-scale computational science projects involving supercomputing.

Officials said selected researchers will be able to use some of the world's most powerful supercomputers that are not commonly available to academia or the private sector.

The department expects to award up to 250 million processor hours next year -- nearly three times the amount awarded for this year.

"The demand for access to ... supercomputing resources has far exceeded what is available, even though total allocations have soared from just three million hours in 2004 to 250 million hours next year," said Raymond Orbach, Energy Department undersecretary for science.

Next year's program will provide the only opportunity for researchers to request allocations on government supercomputers located at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Argonne National Laboratory.

Other supercomputers to be available are at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash.

Officials said a project receiving 1 million hours could run on 2,000 processors for 500 hours, or about 21 days. Running a similar project on a typical desktop computer would take more than 114 years.