Advanced Computing for a Clean Energy Future

Energy issues are central to the most important strategic challenges facing the United States and the world. The energy problem can be broadly defined as providing enough energy to support higher standards of living for a growing fraction of the world’s increasing population without creating intractable conflict or dependencies over strategic resources or causing irreparable harm to our environment. It is increasingly clear that even large-scale deployment of the best, currently available, energy technologies will not be adequate to successfully tackle this problem. Substantial advances in the state of the art in energy generation, distribution, and end use are needed. It is also clear that a significant and sustained effort in basic and applied research and development (R&D) will be required to deliver these advances. It is in this context that high-performance computing takes on a significance that is co-equal with theory and experiment. As computing enters the petascale, a capability that until recently was beyond imagination is now being applied to the R&D problems that must be solved to overcome the barriers to new energy solutions. Oak Ridge National Laboratory is home to two supercomputer centers funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation. The world-leading petascale computers that are now being deployed in Oak Ridge provide us with exceptional tools for advancing toward a secure and sustainable energy future.