The ASCR Leadership Computing Challenge (ALCC) is an allocation program for projects of interest to the Department of Energy (DOE), with an emphasis on high-risk, high-payoff scientific campaigns enabled via high-performance computing (HPC) in areas directly related to the DOE mission, that respond to national emergencies, or that broaden the community of researchers capable of using leadership computing resources.
ALCC is currently soliciting proposals for allocation awards for the 2022-2023 allocation year. High performance computing (HPC) platforms available for the current allocation cycle include Summit, the 200-petaflop IBM AC922 at the OLCF; Theta, the 12-petaflop Cray XC40 machine; and Polaris, a new 44-petaflop accelerated system at the ALCF; and Perlmutter, a new accelerated system at NERSC. Up to thirty percent of the allocatable computing time will be made available on each of these machines to the ALCC program. In addition, limited access may be given to the exascale Frontier system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, pending the pace of system acceptance, for nationally important, and exascale-ready projects.
Open to scientists from the research community in industry, academia, and national laboratories, the ALCC program allocates from 10% to 30% of the computational resources at ASCR’s three high performance computing facilities: NERSC at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Leadership Computing Facilities at Argonne and Oak Ridge National Laboratories. These resources represent some of the world’s fastest and most powerful supercomputers.
ALCC is one of several allocation programs for ASCR supercomputing facilities (see ASCR Allocation Policy) and supports ASCR’s efforts to further DOE mission science, respond to National emergencies, or to broaden community access to leadership computing facilities. To fulfill its goal of broadening community access, ALCC supports a range of project allocation sizes and allocates time across all three ASCR supercomputing facilities. However, proposals seeking very large allocations are more appropriate for the INCITE allocation program. Projects that request more than 25% of the available resources will be considered nonresponsive and may be declined without review.
