The projects, selected competitively based on their potential to advance scientific discovery, were awarded supercomputer time through the DOE Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program.

Biological Sciences

Nicola Ferrier, a senior computer scientist in the MCS division, will lead a new project titled ​“ExaCortex: Exascale Reconstruction of Human Cerebral Cortex.” The project – awarded 250,000 node-hours on Argonne’s Aurora supercomputer – seeks to develop a precise understanding of the neuronal connectivity of the brain. Ferrier and her co-PI from Harvard University will exploit advances in next-generation electron microscopes, accelerator-based computing and deep learning models, with the aim of producing datasets of human brain connectivity at unprecedented scale.

“Reconstruction of a whole human brain with 80 billion neurons is a task well beyond the microscopes and supercomputers available today,” Ferrier said. ​“We see our work as pushing the boundaries toward achieving that future goal.”

Engineering

Senior computational scientist Paul Fischer, computational mathematician Misun Min, and computational scientist Paul Romano will work with four other colleagues from Argonne on a new project titled ​“Advancing Fusion and Fission Energy through Exascale,” led by Pennsylvania State University. The project team will use the HPE Frontier supercomputer (300,000 node-hours) to conduct high-fidelity numerical simulations of unprecedented scale for fusion and fission energy systems.

“These first-of-a-kind simulations are vital to ensure the viability of nuclear energy in a clean energy portfolio,” said Min, who is the Argonne lead for the Center for Efficient Exascale Discretizations, which developed the simulation software to be used in the project.

Earth Science

Xingqiu Yuan, a principal specialist, research software engineering, will participate in a new INCITE project ​“Energy Exascale Earth System Model.” This multi-institutional project, which is led by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, includes investigators from Oak Ridge, Pacific Northwest, and Sandia National Laboratories. The project team – awarded 500,000 node-hours on Aurora at Argonne and 1 million node-hours on Frontier at Oak Ridge – will perform climate simulations with a much finer grid spacing than most climate models have, allowing the capture of climate impacts not possible with conventional models.

“But what really makes this project groundbreaking is the length of time of the simulation runs,” Yuan said. ​“Whereas many groups have done simulations at this resolution for a month or even a year, we will be carrying out decadal-scale simulations. These 10-year runs will enable us to conduct a statistically robust analysis of climate impacts using a global storm-resolving simulation for the first time.”

Project fact sheets with summaries of all the 2024 INCITE projects are available at this link.