washington

The US Department of Energy (DOE) last week announced grants worth $250 million over 10 years to five universities to help to develop the computational aspects of its effort to simulate phenomena associated with nuclear weapons.

Federico Peña, the Secretary of Energy, announced the selection of California Institute of Technology, Stanford University, University of Chicago, University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign and University of Utah as ‘centres of excellence’ under the department's Academic Strategic Alliances Program (ASAP).

The programme is part of the larger Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative, the department's plan to push the state of computational science beyond 100 teraflops by 2006 (a teraflop is a million million floating point operations per second).

The grant awards, selected from 49 proposals, will support the development of algorithms and computational approaches by the universities to help them to solve related, but unclassified, problems. The researchers will have access to three teraflop-scale computers at the department's nuclear weapons laboratories. About 10 per cent of the computers' operating time is expected to be devoted to university work, and converting the computers from classified to unclassified operation can take as little as 20 minutes.

Faculty and postdoctoral graduate researchers at each of the universities will receive about $5 million annually to conduct research on physics-based modelling and high-performance computer simulation.

The problems to be addressed by the universities appear as relevant to industrial applications as to nuclear weapons research. Stanford, for example, will study the complex turbulent flows in aircraft jet engines.

Utah will work to provide a set of science-based tools for numerical simulation of accidental fires and explosions. And the California institute will investigate the effect of shock waves induced by high explosives on various materials in different phases, work that will be useful in areas such as mine accident rescue and building demolition.

Perhaps the most exotic winning proposal was that from Chicago. According to David Schramm, the university's vice-president, it will seek to unravel the astrophysical mystery of how a supernova explodes. Schramm says that, unlike the DOE, he will be able to continue testing his simulations in space.

John Hennessy, dean of engineering at Stanford, says the DOE computers are roughly two orders of magnitude more powerful than any now available to the university.

Victor Reis, assistant secretary of energy for defence programmes, says the DOE did not specify in the competition the research areas to be addressed. He says the aim is simply to “push” high performance computing, and make it work more efficiently.

C. Paul Robinson, director of Sandia National Laboratories, home to the first teraflops machine, says the main objective of ASAP is to develop algorithms and “equation solvers” to enable high-powered computers to run simulations as efficiently as possible.