November 9, 1999

When the nation's high-performance computing and networking community gathers for its annual meeting, 'SC99', this month, Department of Energy scientists, programs and facilities will have key roles in showing how computational science is changing the face of scientific research.

SC99, the conference previously known as Supercomputing, will be held November 13-19 in Portland, Ore., and provides a forum for demonstrating new technologies, forecasting future trends, showing scientific results and presenting achievements in such areas as scalable architectures, networking, enabling technologies, data archives, visualization and computational modeling. SC99 brings together scientists, engineers, designers, managers and executives from all areas of high-performance computing and networking and the global information infrastructure. Among those displaying their latest achievements and applications and making technical presentations are researchers from the Department of Energy's (DOE) national laboratory system.

"For more than 40 years, DOE's research scientists have driven -- and in some cases, invented -- many of the innovations in high-performance computing and networking," said Under Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz. "Our groundbreaking work in this area is leading to stronger national security, improved medical technologies, the development of new efficient manufacturing processes, more effective educational programs and a stronger economy."

Moniz noted that the nation's first supercomputers were developed to support the Energy Department's national security and science missions and that the department pioneered the use of computer networks to allow researchers across the country to utilize the Department of Energy's supercomputing centers through its ESnet program.

At this year's conference, the department's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), a national facility located at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, will mark its 25th anniversary. NERSC was the nation's first unclassified supercomputing center and the first to allow researchers around the nation to seamlessly tap into a center's computing and data storage resources. ESnet, which grew out of that effort to allow remote access, will also mark 25 years of networking leadership.

Throughout the week-long conference, DOE-funded researchers will highlight their work in various panel discussions, technical paper presentations and poster sessions. Additionally, many DOE facilities will have exhibition booths to demonstrate new computing technologies and tools. Below is a list of the department's participants and highlights of their work:

• The Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory will present in-depth results from several high performance cluster computers employing Gigabit Ethernet and will illustrate the price-to-performance benefit of extending the Ethernet standard for cluster computing.
• The Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory will showcase current work in numerical tools and libraries for large-scale computational applications; parallel and cluster computing; advanced networking; and scientific computing applications in combustion, computational chemistry and structural genomics.
• The Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory will demonstrate its work in high-resolution, stereoscopic scientific visualization; state-of-the-art computational facilities for recording and analyzing petabytes of experimental data; and the lab's Center for Data Intensive Computing's impact on high-energy and nuclear physics, aerosol and climate studies, combustion chemistry and cancer treatment.
• The Department of Energy's Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI) will develop supercomputers capable of 100 trillion operations per second in "production mode" by 2004. These computers, located at the department's Sandia, Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, will use simulations and experimental data to generate 3-D full-system simulations of U.S. nuclear weapons systems behavior to help assess and certify the safety and reliability of the nuclear weapons stockpile without further nuclear testing. At SC99, ASCI will feature a room-sized Power Wall to interactively view simulation results from all three ASCI supercomputers in areas that are representative of the ASCI University Alliances program: turbulence and transport; engineering applications; materials science; astrophysics; and, distance/distributed computing/communications.
• DOE2000 is an initiative to develop advanced computing and collaboration technologies for research and development in the areas of physics, chemistry, materials, computing and engineering. Remote operation of electron microscopes and new software tools to rapidly create high performance, portable scientific simulation software will be demonstrated, as well as advanced electronic scientific notebooks.
• The Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory will demonstrate a visualization of the lab's Collider Detector Facility, offering a "virtual tour" of the detector and simulated particle collisions. The use of immersive 3-D stereo gives the feeling of being directly inside the detector, watching the collisions.
• The Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory will showcase the history and contributions of NERSC and ESnet over the past 25 years, as well as provide demonstrations of regional climate simulations and computing on PC clusters running Linux and STACS. STACS, the Storage Access Coordination System, is a new method for efficiently organizing and accessing massive amounts of scientific data.
• The Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory will demonstrate a parallel spectral turbulence application written with the POOMA framework running on an Extreme Linux cluster. Other computing applications include predictive modeling of the global climate, wildfire, and transportation systems and development of scientific visualization tools.
• The Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory will take visitors on a tour of the virtual human. Other highlighted research includes: quantum computing, high performance distributed storage, cluster computing, the genome integrated supercomputing toolkit, climate prediction and 1999 R&D 100 award-winning distributed computing software NetSolve and Atlas.
• The Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory will show ongoing research in computational simulation: Grand Challenge projects; scalable computational chemistry applications that exploit parallel computing; engineering design and simulation for automotive applications; fluid dynamic simulation of flow conditions for Columbia River dams; subsurface flow of waste products; collaborative problem solving environments; collaborative research and distance learning toolkits; and applications in parallel programming tools and libraries.

SC99 is co-sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society and the Association for Computing Machinery and draws about 6,000 attendees annually. For more information about SC99, visit the web site at: http://www.sc99.org/