U.S. Department of Energy 

Office of Science

The Challenge and Promise of Scientific Computing 

Summary 

The U.S. faces a major challenge in scientific computing, one of the foundations of scientific 

discovery in the 21st century. A clear path is available for the U.S. to sustain leadership in this 

critical field. 

Recently, with the start-up of its new supercomputer, known as the Earth Simulator, the 

Japanese introduced the world to a new era in 

scientific computation. The Earth Simulator is 

an impressive machine. It has the computing 

power of the 20 fastest U.S. computers combined and a peak speed of 40 teraflops—three 

times faster than the theoretical peak performance of any U.S. machine. Initially designed 

for climate change studies, the Earth Simulator 

has applications across a broad range of scientific problems from the geosciences to fusion. 

In the next few years, we expect the Japanese to 

build on their success with the Earth Simulator 

to develop other, more powerful general-purpose 

computers. Their strategy seems clear: to provide a focused ultra-high-end computing

resource, recruit the best and brightest scientists 

to collaborate on its use, acquire the knowledge 

needed to dominate a computational science 

discipline, and develop the computer codes to 

harness that knowledge. The U.S Department of 

Energy’s Office of Science understands this 

strategy very well because it is the one we 

developed and used to lead the world in the 

areas of computational science that are 

important to DOE’s missions. 

In the last decade, the power of computation—

our ability to model and simulate experiments 

that we have not conducted in a laboratory—has 

become so great that it must now be considered 

a third pillar, along with theory and experiment, 

in the triad of tools used for scientific discovery. 

This means, in effect, that computing power will 

increasingly be the limiting factor in many areas 

of scientific endeavor. What’s more, it will only

become more critical as computing power 

becomes key to scientific leadership in many

fields. As the Japanese clearly recognize, more 

efficient and more powerful computers are 

essential to fueling the pace of scientific 

discovery—and the solutions to many of our 

most pressing national and international 

challenges. 

Computational science capabilities already

underpin the research and development that 

DOE conducts to meet its energy and national 

security missions. Because these capabilities are 

central to DOE’s missions, and because computational capability is also so critical to scientific 

discovery generally, it is appropriate that DOE’s 

Office of Science brings a renewed focus to this 

challenge. 

 

The Office of Science’s Role 

The Office of Science has been the world leader 

in using advanced computers for scientific discovery for the past 50 years. We have a strong 

tradition of working closely with computer 

vendors to bring their high-end machines into 

productive use. In collaboration with other 

federal agencies and the academic community, 

we have provided both intellectual and technological leadership for this national effort. Beginning more than 25 years ago, the Office of 

Science deployed supercomputing capability in 

the Magnetic Fusion Energy Computing Center, 

which has since evolved into the National 

Energy Research Scientific Computing Center 

(NERSC), a successful model that the National 

Science Foundation in turn adopted with their 

supercomputer centers. 

For more information on the Office of Science visit our website: 

www.science.doe.gov

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U.S. Department of Energy 

Office of Science

Today, Office of Science research programs in 

Biological and Environmental Research, Basic 

Energy Sciences, High Energy and Nuclear 

Physics, and Fusion Energy Sciences all are 

exploiting supercomputing. To further this 

trend, the Scientific Discovery through 

Advanced Computing (SciDAC) program was 

initiated in FY 2001, and it is now bringing 

advanced computation to bear on fundamental 

problems throughout the sciences. 

The national research community’s need for 

scientific computing capability is huge—even 

before the SciDAC program was launched, the 

Office of Science was able to satisfy only a third 

of the demand for high-performance computing. 

The U.S. scientific community suffers both from

the lack of computing capacity and the lack of 

computing capability—the ability to perform the 

largest simulations. The Office of Science has a 

clear role to play in filling this gap. 

The Approach 

The Earth Simulator is an extraordinarily wellintegrated machine based on conventional 

technology. However, new technologies on the 

horizon promise to make the power of an Earth 

Simulator far cheaper and easier to realize. One 

such technology is the "processor in memory" 

architecture that involves the integration of a 

microprocessor and associated memory on a 

single silicon chip. Another is the optical 

interconnect—which replaces the thousands of 

miles of copper wire in a conventional computer 

with ultra-high-bandwidth fiber connections. 

Together, such technologies lead many scientists 

to believe that a petaflop computer, one with 25 

times the capability of the Earth Simulator, is 

within reach. By spearheading an effort to 

develop such technologies, the Office of Science 

has the opportunity to lead the coming scientific 

computing revolution. The following steps 

provide a pathway to delivering U.S. scientists 

the computing power they need: 

 

• A strong partnership between the Office of 

Science and computer vendors must be 

reinvigorated to drive the development of 

promising computing architectures for 

science simulations. 

 

• In the short term, the science gap in the U.S. 

created by the Earth Simulator can be reduced by significantly enhancing existing 

high-end computing capability and 

networking. 

• In the mid and long term, an aggressive, 

integrated portfolio of investments in advanced architecture, computational science, 

and focused technology deployment will 

dramatically advance the nation’s science 

mission and allow the U.S. to regain and 

sustain the lead in supercomputing and its 

applications. 

• Focused collaborations with other Federal 

agencies and the academic community will 

foster the development of the best computational science to exploit these new capabilities. The Office of Science will build on the 

success of SciDAC by promoting innovative 

partnerships between applied mathematicians, computer scientists, computational 

scientists, and other disciplines to apply 

ultra-scale computation to problems of 

national interest and priority. 

The Office of Science believes that the opportunities made available by the revolution in scientific computation, foreshadowed so clearly by

the Earth Simulator, will lead to extraordinary

new scientific capabilities for the Nation. We 

must build and strengthen the third pillar of the 

triad of discovery if we are to probe the deepest 

secrets of Nature and reap the technical, 

economic, and social benefits such understanding will yield. 

For further information on this subject contact: 

Dr. Edward Oliver, Director 

Office of Advance Scientific Computing 

Research 

301-903-7486 

Ed.Oliver@science.doe.gov 

For more information on the Office of Science visit our website: 

www.science.doe.gov

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