Department of Energy Announces $40 Million for Research on Distributed Resilient Systems for Science

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced $40 million in funding for five collaborative projects in distributed resilient systems for science.

The computational workflows associated with modern science are becoming increasingly complex, often processing an astounding amount of data generated by geographically distributed instruments. The data is analyzed using a variety of local and remote compute resources and integrated with simulations and artificial intelligence (AI)-enhanced models to both direct the ongoing experiments and inform scientific progress. The critical nature of these distributed workloads requires advancements to the science of resilience of distributed systems.

“Scientific research is getting more complex and will need next-generation workflows as we move forward with larger data sets and new tools spread across the U.S.,” said Ceren Susut, DOE Acting Associate Director of Science for Advanced Scientific Computing Research. “This program will explore how science can be conducted in this new environment – where tools and data are in multiple places but must be integrated in a high-performance fashion.”

Projects include:

• A collaboration led by the University of Southern California, Marina del Rey, partnering with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Argonne National Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, developing novel methods in swarm intelligence to distributed resource allocation.
• A collaboration led by the University of California, Merced, partnering with the University of Iowa and Argonne National Laboratory, improving our understanding of scalable, federated, privacy-preserving machine learning.

The projects were selected by competitive peer review under the DOE Funding Opportunity Announcement for Distributed Resilient Systems, DE-FOA-0002902.

Total funding is $40 million for projects lasting up to five years in duration, with $9.2 million in Fiscal Year 2023 dollars and outyear funding contingent on congressional appropriations. The list of projects and more information can be found on the Advanced Scientific Computing Research program homepage.

Selection for award negotiations is not a commitment by DOE to issue an award or provide funding. Before funding is issued, DOE and the applicants will undergo a negotiation process, and DOE may cancel negotiations and rescind the selection for any reason during that time.