The allocations are part of the largest-ever awards of the Department's supercomputing time, announced by Energy Secretary Steven Chu. "The Department of Energy's supercomputers provide an enormous competitive advantage for the United States," said Secretary Chu."This is a great example of how investments in innovation can help lead the way to new industries, new jobs, and new opportunities for America to succeed in the global marketplace."

Fifty-seven innovative research projects, chosen on a competitive basis, will use computer simulations to perform virtual experiments that in most cases would be impossible or impractical in the natural world at this time. Utilizing two world-leading supercomputers with a computational capacity roughly equal to 135,000 quad-core laptops, the research projects could, for example, help in understanding fusion plasma behavior, speed the development of more efficient solar cells, improvements in biofuel production, or more effective medications to help slow the progression of Parkinson's disease.

PPPL's Weixing Wang has been awarded 20 million supercomputing hours on the Jaguar at the DOE Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and PPPL's William Tang has been awarded 8 million supercomputing hours on the Intrepid at the DOE Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. Four additional PPPL scientists — Stephane Ethier, Greg Hammett, Wei-Li Lee, and David Mikkelsen — are involved in PPPL and DOE Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory projects receiving awards. The researchers will be using the time for fusion energy-related research regarding simulations of plasma turbulence at small and large scales.

"The application of modern computation to the grand challenge of understanding turbulence in fusion plasmas offers potential for breakthroughs in our ability to control turbulence. These projects represent the leading edge of this fertile and crucial area," said PPPL Director Stewart Prager.

Wang's INCITE simulation studies at Oak Ridge will focus on acquiring improved understanding of how plasma flows are generated and to develop predictive capability for plasma rotation in ITER burning plasmas. The INCITE simulation studies led by Tang (with Ethier as co-principal investigator) at Argonne will focus on the key question of how turbulent transport properties change as we move from current-sized tokamaks to ITER.

Awarded under the Department's Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program, many of the new and continuing INCITE projects aim to further renewable energy solutions and understand of the environmental impacts of energy use. The program, open to all scientists, is supported by the Department's Office of Science and managed by the DOE Leadership Computing Facilities at the Department's Argonne and Oak Ridge National Laboratories, which host some of the world's fastest supercomputers.

To read more about the 2011 INCITE awards, go to: http://www.er.doe.gov/ascr/incite/