Department of Energy hands out supercomputer time

The Cray jaguar is one of the supercomputers that will be made available to researchers

The US Department of Energy (DoE) has announced plans to grant over $1.6bn (£990m) worth of supercomputing hours to dozens of science and engineering research projects.

The DoE said that the programme could offer supercomputer resources to 69 projects as part of the Innovate and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (Incite) initiative.

The seven year-old programme is designed to give researchers time to crunch data on top supercomputing clusters.

Computing time will be given on systems at the DoE's Oak Ridge and Argonne National Laboratories. Oak Ridge is home to the world's fastest supercomputing cluster, the Cray Jaguar, while Argonne's Blue Gene/P cluster ranks eighth overall.

Projects being awarded the computing time include research into fusion energy, managing carbon, modelling climate change and disease. The DoE hopes to help slash the time needed for research by making powerful computing systems available to the researchers.

"Computation and supercomputing are critical to solving some of our greatest scientific challenges," said DoE secretary Dr Steven Chu.

"This year's Incite awards reflect the enormous growth in demand for complex modelling and simulation capabilities, which are essential to improving our economic prosperity and global competitiveness."