The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has announced up to $3 million in funding for 10 projects to help American manufacturers leverage the national laboratories' high performance computing (HPC) capabilities to address manufacturing challenges through state-of-the-art modeling, simulation, and data analysis. This funding will support collaboration between manufacturers and the national labs 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 High Performance Computing for Manufacturing (HPC4Mfg) program, which is supported by the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy’s (EERE) Advanced Manufacturing Office, enables the use of 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 program seeks proposals in the following primary areas:
- Proposals that require HPC modeling and simulation to overcome impactful manufacturing process challenges, resulting in reduced energy consumption and/or increased productivity.
- Proposals that uniquely exploit HPC modeling and simulation to reduce energy consumption through improved clean energy technology design and clean energy manufacturing.
Selected projects will be awarded up to $300,000 of DOE funding to support compute cycles and work performed by the national lab partners. The industry partner must provide a participant contribution of at least 20% of the DOE funding for the project. In addition, follow-on projects to previously-awarded, successful demonstration projects will be considered. Selected follow-on projects will be awarded up to $300,000 of DOE funding, with a required 50% industry cost share, half of which must be a cash contribution. Concept paper applications for demonstration projects and follow-on projects are due by March 15, 2018.
The HPC4Mfg program anticipates making multiple awards in demonstration and follow-on projects, subject to the availability of funding. Final selections will be announced in July 2018.
The HPC4Mfg program was established by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory with support from Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Lawrence Berkeley National laboratory. It has supported 47 projects and provided more than $15 million for these public-private partnerships. 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 and Argonne National Laboratory provide computing cycles to support this program.
View the solicitation and submission instructions.
