DOE Awards 265 Million Processor-Hours To Science Projects

Weather Storm writes "DOE's Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program supports computationally intensive, large-scale research projects at a governmental level. They recently awarded 265 million processor-hours to 55 scientific projects, the largest amount of supercomputing resource awards donated in the DOE's history and three times that of last year's award. The winners were chosen based on their potential breakthroughs in the areas of science and engineering research, and the suitability of the project for using supercomputers. This year's INCITE applications ranged from developing nanomaterials to advancing the nation's basic understanding of physics and chemistry, and from designing quieter cars to improving commercial aircraft design. The next round of the INCITE competition will be announced this summer. Expansion of the DOE Office of Science's computational capabilities should approximately quadruple the 2009 INCITE award allocations to close to a billion processor hours."

Re:265 Million Processor-Hours On What Processors?

[CaptainPatent]

The supercomputers which were alloted award hours appear to be on:

Blue Gene [wikipedia.org]
Cray XT4 [wikipedia.org]
Cray X1E [wikipedia.org]
and NERSC HPC which doesn't have a convenient Wikepedia link, but comprises AMD Opteron processors.
This is according to this Newswise report. [newswise.com]

Re:its scary to think

[MadMidnightBomber]

Any sort of password/crypto cracking - using a brute-force search of the entire keyspace - parallelises very easily. See distributed.net for example.