U.S. Department of Energy Grants for Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing Teams

The U.S. Department of Energy is offering $60 million in grants available to universities, private industry and others to utilize national supercomputers to assist scientific discovery.  The Press Release states: 

Program Will Develop Advanced Computing Tools to Accelerate Discovery

WASHINGTON, D.C.—Today, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced a plan to provide $60 million to establish multidisciplinary teams to develop new tools and techniques to harness supercomputers for scientific discovery.  

The program, known as SciDAC, or Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing, brings together experts in computer science and applied mathematics with researchers in specific scientific disciplines to develop new high-performance computing tactics for tackling scientific questions. The aim is to accelerate scientific discovery through the development of powerful new computational tools and techniques for scientific research.

"The Department of Energy is proud to announce our investment into programs that will keep our nation globally competitive when it comes to developing advanced computing tools," said Under Secretary for Science Paul Dabbar. "Through SciDAC, researchers will have access to the Department's computing resources that will lead to discoveries advancing innovation within our scientific community." 

SciDAC is a joint effort among the six major program offices within DOE’s Office of Science. It addresses problems in disciplines including high energy and nuclear physics, condensed matter physics, materials science, chemistry, fusion energy sciences, and Earth systems research. 

Teams, known as “SciDAC Institutes,” are expected to take advantage of DOE Office of Science supercomputing facilities at Argonne, Oak Ridge, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories.

Applications will be open to universities, national laboratories, industry, and nonprofits, with multi-institutional partnerships encouraged. Awards will be selected competitively based on peer review. Total planned funding from the DOE’s Office of Science will be $60 million for five-year projects, with outyear funding contingent on Congressional appropriations.

Letters of intent are required and are due on April 14, 2020 by 5 p.m. Eastern time.  Final applications are due on May 12, 2020 by 5 p.m. Eastern time.  The full text of the Funding Opportunity Announcement, along with a parallel, companion announcement for DOE laboratories, can be found here on the ASCR website.

US Department of Energy Online Laboratory Partnering Service

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has released a new Lab Partnering Service that allows review of patents for licensing from 17 national DOE laboratories.  The Lab Partnering Service website states:

The Laboratory Partnering Service ("LPS") is a suite of online applications enabling access to leading experts, projects, and patents from across the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the national laboratories. It delivers a host of information to provide access to a portfolio of investment opportunities. The LPS enables rapid discovery of expertise and serves as a conduit between the investor and the innovator by providing multi-faceted search capability across numerous technology areas and across the national laboratories.

• Expert Search

The Expert Search provides customers a direct conduit to experts from the DOE’s national laboratories. This categorized list is a selection of lab-identified leading experts across several "hot" technology areas with ability to further refine the list of the experts by sub-specialty.

• Technical Summaries

The Technical Summaries provide information about the numerous technologies associated patents, patent applications, and publications from DOE’s national laboratories and other participating research institutions available for licensing.

• Visual Patent Search

This search tool enables a unique, visually-facilitated search of the patent content contained in the Lab Partnering Service. This patent content contains published US patent applications and issued US patents resulting from Department of Energy funded R&D.

The Visual Patent Search tool was created using two powerful technologies developed at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, the IN-SPIRE™ Visual Document Analysis and the Scalable Reasoning System (SRS). Using these analysis tools, a tiered patent categorization system was created from the "bottom up", enabling Lab Partnering Service to develop a unique way of searching DOE-patents beyond a simple key word search.

The DOE also offers the Energy Innovation Portal, which concerns access to energy efficient and renewable energy DOE funded patents for licensing.  [Hat Tip to Technology Transfer Central.]  

$430 Million Public/Private Investment in Exascale Computing in U.S.

The U.S. Department of Energy announced on June 15, 2017 the award of $258 million in research funding to six U.S. companies: Advanced Microsystems, Cray, Intel, HP, NVIDIA, and IBM.  The research funding is to support the development of the exascale supercomputer ecosystem.  An exascale computer is 50 times faster than today’s super computers.  The U.S. has five of the world’s top-ten fastest computers, but the U.S.’s fastest computer is third after the top two located in China.  The six companies will provide additional funding to make the investment close to $430 million in total.  The press release is available, here.