Sandia National Laboratories announced that four of its researchers have received three-year grants totaling $2.6 million from the Department of Energy’s Office of Science to pursue computational research proposals that would help to create an exascale computer. The exascale computer would be 1000 times faster than a petascale computer, the fastest computer now available. It operates at a quadrillion operations per second. The new, faster technology would be useful in computation-intensive areas that include basic research, engineering, earth and materials sciences, biology, energy issues and national security. The winners and projects are: • Robert Armstrong: He received $834,000 for his project titled, “COMPOSE-HPC: Software Composition for Extreme Scale Computational Science and Engineering,” in the category of X-Stack Software Research. X-Stack refers to the scientific software stack that supports extreme-scale scientific computing, from operating systems to development environments. • Kenneth Moreland: He was awarded $598,406 for “A Pervasive Parallel Processing Framework for Data Visualization and Analysis at Extreme Scale.” His intent is to design a better programming paradigm able to guide visualization algorithms in all parts of the algorithm and its implementation. • Ronald Minnich: Awarded $615,000 in the category of X-Stack Software Research, his work is titled, “A Fault-Oblivious Extreme-Scale Execution Environment.” His goal is to build an HPC system software stack that runs correctly even as faults occur. It is led by Sandia and includes Los Alamos National Laboratory, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Ohio State University, Boston University, IBM and Bell Labs. • Kevin Pedretti: He received $572,500 for his work titled, “Enabling Exascale Hardware and Software Design through Scalable System Virtualization,” also in the X-Stack Software Research category. His objective is to apply scalable system virtualization techniques to enable the range of innovation necessary to realize productive exascale computing. The project involves researchers from the University of New Mexico, Northwestern University and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, along with Sandia. Sandia National Laboratories is a multiprogram laboratory operated and managed by Sandia Corp., a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin Corp., for the US Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. Its major responsibilities include national security, energy and environmental technologies, and economic competitiveness. For more information, visit: www.sandia.gov