The Energy Department announced up to $3 million in available support for manufacturers to use supercomputers at the department’s national laboratories to tackle major manufacturing challenges. The High-Performance Computing for Manufacturing (HPC4Mfg) Program enables the use of high-performance computing (HPC) expertise and resources for the manufacturing sector to address research and development challenges with HPC and investigate its use to support advanced energy and manufacturing issues.
The Energy Department plans to select 8 to 10 projects for this fourth round of funding and seeks meritorious industry partners to participate in short-term, collaborative projects.
“The technologies adopted as a result of the HPC4Mfg Program can have a significant impact with the potential to close the knowledge gaps in the manufacturing and energy industry,” said Mark Johnson, director of the Advanced Manufacturing Office. “This program aligns well with the technical focus areas our office is pursuing in early-stage, applied research and development.”
The selected projects will leverage the national labs’ HPC capabilities to apply state-of-the-art modeling, simulation, and data analysis to address manufacturing challenges that will aid in decision-making, innovate in processes and design, improve quality, predict performance and failure, quicken or eliminate testing, and/or shorten the time of adoption of new technologies.
The Energy Department plans to select 8 to 10 projects for this fourth round of funding and seeks meritorious industry partners to participate in short-term, collaborative projects. A number of companies and their initial concepts will be selected and paired with a national lab HPC expert to jointly develop a full proposal this summer, with final selections to be announced in November. Selected projects will receive up to $300,000 to support access to supercomputers and experts at the partnering national labs, which include Lawrence Livermore, Lawrence Berkeley, and Oak Ridge national laboratories. Concept paper applications are due July 26, 2017.
The Advanced Manufacturing Office (AMO), within the department’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, supports early-stage applied research and development of new materials, information, and processes that improve American manufacturing’s energy efficiency, as well as platform technologies for manufacturing energy products. In 2015, AMO supported Lawrence Livermore to establish the HPC4Mfg Program. The Advanced Scientific Computing Research Program within DOE’s Office of Science also supports the program with HPC cycles through its Leadership Computing Challenge allocation program. Additionally, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory provides computing cycles to support this program.
The Energy Department recently announced nearly $3.9 million for 13 new projects from Round 3 of the program.
View the solicitation and submission instructions.
Filed Under: Financing
