DOE is planning to invest $16 million over four years to accelerate the design of new materials through the use of supercomputers utilizing teams from ORNL and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
The two teams will work to develop software to design fundamentally new functional materials destined to revolutionize applications in alternative and renewable energy, electronics and a wide range of other fields. The research teams include experts from universities and other national labs.
The new grants—part of DOE’s Computational Materials Sciences program begun in 2015 as part of the U.S. Materials Genome Initiative—reflect the enormous recent growth in computing power and the increasing capability of high-performance computers to model and simulate the behavior of matter at the atomic and molecular scales.
The teams are expected to develop sophisticated and user-friendly open-source software that captures the essential physics of relevant systems and can be used by the broader research community and by industry to accelerate the design of new functional materials.
