The Department of Energy’s Office of Science and National Nuclear Security Administration are offering up another funding opportunity for research into extreme scale supercomputer technology. The agencies issued a joint Request for Proposals yesterday for contracts that could total approximately $100 million. Proposals under the program, dubbed FastForward 2, are due May 9, and the funding period is from July of this year to November 2016. The program is seeking proposals from companies interested in researching extreme scale node architectures or memory technologies. The initial funding period under the 2012 FastForward program is expiring at the end of the fiscal year.
The program, which uses a “co-design” approach that pairs companies with scientists and engineers at DOE/NNSA labs, is managed by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in conjunction with Lawrence Berkeley, Los Alamos, Sandia, Oak Ridge, Argonne and Pacific Northwest national laboratories. “Under the FastForward Program, vendors from the computing industry are awarded research contracts to accelerate technologies critical to the development of next-generation, extreme scale supercomputers, which will provide the necessary simulation and computing capabilities to achieve DOE’s missions of national defense, scientific research, and energy security,” Livermore said in a statement.
