Joint Institute for Computational Sciences (JICS)

PETALS

Call for Proposals for Candidate Themes for 2006 PETALS

The University of Tennessee-Oak Ridge National Laboratory Joint Institute for Computational Sciences and the Department of Energy leadership computing facility (LCF) of the National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) at ORNL are soliciting proposals from the community for candidate themes for workshops in the Petascale Laboratory for Simulation Science (PETALS) program, launched in 2006.

PETALS workshops provide a mechanism to bring together world leaders in computational petascale science, and in doing so

  • stimulate the theory and computational methodology necessary for advanced petascale science and engineering;
  • develop and exploit new community-based design and virtual synthesis tools in key areas of science; and
  • support user-initiated projects at the NCCS.
PETALS will feature tutorial lectures by, and informal exchanges with, international leaders in theory and computational methods and offer significant hands-on experience with the latest state-of-the-art codes and methods.

Facilities

The National Center for Computational Sciences currently houses an
18.5 TeraFLOPS (TF) Cray X1E scalable vector system and a 25TF Cray XT3 super scalar system. The ORNL-based NCCS will acquire and deploy a 250+TF high-performance computing system by 2007 and a 1000TF
(1 PetaFLOPS) Cray Baker system by 2008.

The NCCS will also incorporate reliable, robust system software essential to optimal sustained performance at the petascale level. These advances are aimed at providing the science and engineering communities the means to address some of their most computationally challenging research needs.

Workshop Participation

PETALS workshop participants will be encouraged to continue interactions begun during the sessions and apply the methods and codes of their choice using ORNL leadership-class computing facilities. Allocations on the NCCS computing systems may be requested for exploratory projects using the online New Project Request form at https://secure.ccs.ornl.gov/new_request.html. Specify the goal of the PETALS proposal, scientific milestones, and resources desired.

Additionally, each year the Office of Science issues a call for proposals seeking high priority, high payoff computationally intensive experiments, where the capability of the LCF systems can facilitate new breakthroughs in science and enable the Office of Science to be "first to market" with important scientific and technological capabilities, ideas, and software. More information on this call can be found at http://nccs.gov/accounts/request_access/proposal_process.html.

To Apply

Most PETALS workshops will run for a week, have 10-25 participants, and be held at the UT-ORNL Joint Institute for Computational Sciences located on the ORNL campus. However, we are open to longer-term PETALS events, an increased number of participants, and other locations, if particularly persuasive (such as in conjunction with a particularly relevant conference with suitable hosting facilities nearby; or jointly with similar organizations, for example other DOE or NSF scientific computing facilities).

Please submit proposals to Thomas Zacharia (zachariat@ornl.gov) in Word format, using the guidelines found in the PETALS template.