ACCELERATING DISCOVERY IN SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING THROUGH PETASCALE SIMULATIONS AND ANALYSIS (PetaApps)

Agency: National Science Foundation

URL: http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2008/nsf08592/nsf08592.htm

Due Date: October 30, 2008

This solicitation seeks proposals to develop the future simulation and analysis tools that can use petascale computing to advance the frontiers of scientific and engineering research.   Proposals are sought from researchers aiming to capitalize on emerging petascale computing architectures, catalyzing potentially transformative research.  NSF's emphasis is on implementation and exploitation of forefront techniques.   Proposers must be prepared to demonstrate that they have a research problem that requires and can exploit petascale computing capabilities.  Proposals from or including junior researchers are encouraged as one of the goals of this solicitation is to build a community capable of using petascale computing.

Proposals are encouraged in the following areas, although work in other areas consistent with the solicitation goals will also be considered:

• enhancing algorithmic scalability using techniques that better exploit multi-threaded, highly parallel, hierarchical architectures,
• improving and creating data sampling, analysis, and clustering algorithms for massive data sets,
• developing innovative modeling and simulation algorithms suitable for petascale systems,
• developing software to solve forefront scientific problems on petascale systems,
• optimizing software for specific petascale hardware or predicted “best guess” extrapolations to future hardware,
• exploring innovative computational techniques that were not previously considered viable because of limited hardware capability,
• conducting performance analysis and profiling of software that is heavily used but may never have been analyzed for scalability, bottle-necks, and optimization,
• changing functioning problem solvers by substituting algorithmic implementations known from computational science research to scale more effectively to computing systems of very large scale.

The focus of the proposal may be in any of the following areas:

• Atmospheric Sciences
• Astronomy and Astrophysics
• Chemistry
• Computer Science
• Earth Sciences
• Engineering
• Materials Science
• Mathematics and Statistics
• Ocean Sciences
• Physics
• Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences