INDUSTRY

Pacific Northwest National Lab is the latest part of the Department of Energy's INCITE program for supercomputing. The Department of Energy awarded about 95 million hours of computing time to participants around the nation, and PNNL is on both sides of that puzzle. PNNL scientists are getting time on another DOE supercomputer. The lab will allow Corning Incorporated to use 750,000 processor hours on it's supercomputer for chemistry calculations. To give you an idea of the power of these computers, it's about 10,000 times as fast as your home computer, it's like putting 2,000 of them together. "The combination of large amounts of memory, fast communication between processors, and a large amount of disk space allows us to run large computational chemistry problems that cannot be run on large computers," said Erich Vorpagel, a Chief Scientist at PNNL. PNNL's computer is used to develop chemistry theory much faster and safer than actually doing the experiments in the lab.