Petascale Computing Resource Allocations

Petascale Computing Resource Allocations from the National Science Foundation allow research teams to work closely with the Blue Waters project team in preparing their codes. Applications for these allocations are due once a year, throughout the life of the Blue Waters project.

The Petascale Computing Resource Allocations solicitation from NSF explains that: "a research group will only be granted significant access to [Blue Waters] after its request for a resource allocation has been successful in a competitive, merit review managed by NSF. The Petascale Computing Resource Allocations solicitation represents the first phase of that merit review process. Successful proposers to this solicitation will be granted a pre-allocation of Blue Waters resources together with a small amount of funds to support travel costs...In the months prior to Blue Waters entering production in mid-2011, groups receiving awards under the current Petascale Computing Resource Allocations competition will be asked to submit a request for a final allocation. Reviewers of the final allocation requests will be asked to review progress and readiness."

In order to receive an award of time on Blue Waters through the National Science Foundation allocation process, teams must receive a pre-allocation through the current Petascale Computing Resource Allocations process.

Current Petascale Computing Resource Allocations winners collaborating with NCSA and the Blue Waters team include:

• Computational relativity and gravitation at petascale: Simulating and visualizing astrophysically realistic compact binaries

  Principal Investigator: Manuela Campanelli, Rochester Institute of Technology
• Electronic properties of strongly correlated systems using petascale computing

  Principal Investigators: Kristjan Haule, Rutgers University New Brunswick; Sergey Savrasov, University of California-Davis
• Petascale research in earthquake system science on Blue Waters
  
Principal Investigator: Thomas Jordan, University of Southern California
• Testing hypotheses about climate prediction at unprecedented resolutions on the NSF Blue Waters system
  
Principal Investigators: Benjamin Kirtman, University of Miami; William Large, University Corporation For Atmospheric Research; David Randall, Colorado State University; Cristiana Stan, Institute of Global Environment and Society
• Computational chemistry at the petascale
  
Principal Investigator: Monica Lamm, Iowa State University
• Enabling science at the petascale: From binary systems and stellar core collapse to gamma-ray bursts
  
Principal Investigator: Erik Schnetter, Louisiana State University & Agricultural and Mechanical College
• Petascale simulations of complex biological behavior in fluctuating environments

  Principal Investigator: Ilias Tagkopoulos, University of California-Davis
• Enabling large-scale, high-resolution, and real-time earthquake simulations on petascale parallel computers

  Principal Investigator: Liqiang Wang, University of Wyoming
• Understanding tornadoes and their parent supercells through ultra-high resolution simulation/analysis
  
Principal Investigator: Robert Wilhelmson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• Petascale simulation of turbulent stellar hydrodynamics

  Principal Investigator: Paul Woodward, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities
• Petascale computations for complex turbulent flows

  Principal Investigator: Pui-Kuen Yeung, Georgia Institute of Technology
• Breakthrough petascale quantum Monte Carlo calculations

  Principal Investigator: Shiwei Zhang, College of William and Mary

Previous winners of Petascale Computing Resource Allocation awards, who continue to collaborate with the Blue Waters team, include:

• Formation of the first galaxies: predictions for the next generation of observatories
  
Principal Investigator: Brian O'Shea, Michigan State University
• Simulation of contagion on very large social networks with Blue Waters

  Principal Investigators: Keith Bisset, Virginia Tech; Shawn Brown, Carnegie-Mellon University; Douglas Roberts, Research Triangle Institute
• Lattice quantum chromodynamics on Blue Waters
  
Principal Investigator: Robert Sugar, University of California, Santa Barbara
• Super instruction architecture for petascale computing
  
Principal Investigator: Rodney Bartlett, University of Florida
• Peta-Cosmology: galaxy formation and virtual astronomy
  
Principal Investigator: Kentaro Nagamine, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
• The computational microscope
  
Principal Investigator: Klaus Schulten, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign