Public Benefits

Over the past half-century, ASCR-supported researchers from universities, national laboratories, and industry have made significant enduring advances in applied mathematics, computer science, networking research, and in the development and deployment of High Performance Computing facilities and advanced networks. Together, these have been essential enablers of modern computational science and engineering tools and techniques that are used throughout U.S. industry and the government. Below are a just a few specific examples of the breakthroughs and public benefits of ASCR research and facilities.

Recent Articles:

Free Workshop - ASCR held a free workshop for commercial software developers and industry to make available DOE software developed under the SciDAC program. These tools, libraries and applications can ease the transition to multicore and many are available for no-cost licensing to the private sector. A number of the developers will be presenting, and there will be time for personal interaction with them. DOE also seeks input on software topics for collaboration and potential Small Business Innovation & Research (SBIR) grants. More Information »

 

Breakthroughs - A panel of computational scientists, applied mathematicians, and computer scientists gathered in February 2008 to identify recent breakthroughs in computational science and enabling technologies, supported by the Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research. This report is the result of that effort: Link to the report »

 

Case Studies - The U.S. Council on Competitiveness (www.compete.org ) generated a series of case studies to showcase the competitive benefits that can be achieved from modeling and simulation with HPC (http://www.compete.org/publications/idea/28/high-performance-computing/). In each instance, these organizations advanced their R&D, accelerated innovation, created important new knowledge and shortened time-to-market for new products - all essential to business success in the face of global competition. Each organization also indicated significant cost savings and revenue enhancement. The case studies listed here also discuss problems organizations faced and the solutions developed through partnerships with ASCR-funded facilities.

 
  • Procter & Gamble has a new imperative: ensuring that current and new products are environmentally sustainable without sacrificing product performance and market share. Through a grant from ASCR's INCITE program P&G's research scientists were able to study the complex interactions of billions of atoms and create simulations at the atomic level to determine how tiny submicroscopic structures impact the characteristics of the ingredients in their soaps, detergents, lotions and shampoos.
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  • Through DOE's INCITE program Boeing R&D researchers gained access to Oak Ridge National Lab's leadership class systems, allowing their scientists and researchers to tackle problems beyond the reach of the company's in-house supercomputers and HPC clusters while bolstering access to their own in-house high performance computing (HPC) capabilities.
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  • DreamWorks Animation SKG relies on powerful high performance computing (HPC) clusters to make its characters come alive. But when the company's software engineers needed to test new software concepts to significantly improve the capabilities of their proprietary tools, DOE's INCITE program enabled the company to refine and test its redesigned software on the leadership-class supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory