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.

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 currently soliciting proposals for allocation awards for the 2024-2025 allocation year. High performance computing (HPC) platforms available for the current allocation cycle include Frontier, the new exascale system at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF); Aurora, the new exascale system at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF); Polaris, a new 44-petaflop accelerated system at ALCF; and Perlmutter, a new accelerated system at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC). 

The ALCC program has a strong legacy of advancing scientific discovery and innovation across a wide range of DOE mission applications, including energy efficient engineering, computer science, materials and chemical sciences, geosciences and energy-related biosciences, biological and environmental sciences, computational fluid dynamics, high energy and nuclear physics, fusion sciences, cosmology, the design and control of scientific user facilities and experiments at these facilities, nuclear energy, fossil energy and renewable energy.

For more information, please visit https://science.osti.gov/ascr/Facilities/Accessing-ASCR-Facilities/ALCC

Please send questions or email correspondence to ALCC-ASCR@science.doe.gov