washington

A new integrated strategy for high-performance computing and simulation for the national laboratories funded by the US Department of Energy has been proposed by the department's senior scientific administrator.

Ernie Moniz, the new under-secretary of energy, last week told a meeting of the Laboratory Operations Board — a group of department officials, laboratory directors and outside experts set up to oversee management reforms at the labs — that a new approach is needed to give scientists at the laboratories access to the best hardware and software for computer-intensive problems.

Moniz, who chaired the physics department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before joining the government last month, believes that the department's non-weapons laboratories need to take an approach to supercomputing parallel to the $500-million-a-year Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI) under way at the nuclear weapons laboratories.

The directors of the non-weapons laboratories are intensely jealous of ASCI, and have been fighting without success for better access to both the hardware it will buy and the knowledge of computational science it is expected to yield.

Many computer codes used by the scientists at present, Moniz says, “are developed in a rather isolated environment, without the benefit of advanced software engineering”.

Some of the department's main research tasks could benefit, Moniz says — including the simulation of combustion in car engines, development of global climate models, hydrogeological studies for nuclear waste clean-up, and the processing of data from particle accelerators. “This kind of problem-driven approach to solving simulation problems is something the laboratories should be doing and, frankly, I don't see who else will do it,” he told the board.

Moniz has asked officials to report early in the new year on the laboratories’ computing and simulation needs and how they could best be met. Options could include wider use of ASCI machines for non-weapons-related work.

“I'd like to see an integrated approach across the department,” says Moniz. Martha Krebs, assistant secretary for energy research, and Vic Reis, assistant secretary of defence programmes, have been “in dialogue” on the issue, he adds.

But Reis, who gets his money from the national security budget, has been reluctant to share ASCI facilities with other laboratories. Directors of the non-weapons labs have told Moniz they feel unfairly excluded from ASCI. “They have [said that], but it is changing,” Moniz says. “We're not where we'd like to be yet, but I believe that Defense Programs is opening up significantly because of the changed nature of its mission.”

But some officials say that Moniz may find it harder than he thinks to integrate anything across the fractious laboratory complex, as the web of connections between the laboratories and politicians makes it difficult for the energy department to administer them as a coherent group.