The mission of the Advanced Leadership Computing Challenge (ALCC) is to provide an allocation program for projects of interest to the Department of Energy (DOE) with an emphasis on high-risk, high-payoff simulations in areas directly related to the DOE mission and for broadening the community of researchers capable of using leadership computing resources.
Call for Proposals
Proposals for 2013 ALCC are due by
11:59 PM EST February 1, 2013. Please submit the proposals to the following email address:
ALCC@science.doe.gov. Proposals undergo peer review and awards will be announced in May, 2013. The one year allocations will begin July 1, 2013. (See
ALCC Application Details).
For the 2013 ALCC Call for proposals, projects of special interest to the DOE include the following:
- Advancing the clean energy agenda.
- Advancing a robust predictive understanding of the Earth’s climate and environmental systems.
- Responding to natural and man-made disasters or incidents; e.g., hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis, pandemics.
- Broadening the community of researchers capable of using leadership computing resources.
- Exploration of new frontiers in physical, biological, and computational sciences
Overview of ALCC
Open to scientists from the research community in industry, academia, and national laboratories, the ALCC program allocates up to 30% of the computational resources at ASCR’s supercomputing facilities. ASCR supercomputing facilities include NERSC at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Leadership Computing Facilities at Argonne and Oak Ridge National Laboratories . These resources represent some of the world’s fastest and most powerful supercomputers.
ALCC is one of several allocation programs for ASCR supercomputing facilities (see ASCR Allocation Policy
(23KB)) and supports our efforts to further DOE mission science and to broaden community access to leadership computing facilities. To fulfill its goal of broadening community access, ALCC supports a wide range of project allocation sizes and allocates time across all three ASCR supercomputing facilities.
ALCC grants one year awards. In 2012, 29 ALCC awards were granted, amounting to 697 million processor hours with projects ranging in size from 2 million to 80 million processor hours. Scientific discovery advanced by ALCC allocations range across the DOE mission space include (but not limited to) energy efficiency, computer science, climate modeling, materials science, bioenergy, and basic research. (See ALCC Past Awards and Awardees).
ALCC Resources
ALCC allocates high performance computing time on the primary HPC machines at each ASCR facility. For a description of the computing resources at ASCR facilities, please see
See right side bar for more ALCC information links.