Department of Energy Announces $28.9 Million for Research to Develop Advanced Chemical Sciences Software

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced $28.9 million in funding for nine research projects to advance the development of sophisticated software for the chemical sciences. 

Projects funded in this announcement will develop new computational methods and open-source codes to take advantage of the DOE national laboratories’ rapidly advancing supercomputing capabilities, including emerging exascale systems capable of a billion-billion operations per second. These advanced computational tools and computing infrastructures will guide and accelerate innovation that addresses the nation’s science and technology priorities by enabling simulations of complex chemical systems and processes to be performed at scale with high-fidelity. 

“DOE’s national labs are using our world-leading supercomputing resources to solve the nation’s most pressing challenges,” said Harriet Kung, Deputy Director for Science Programs for the DOE Office of Science. “These investments will enable researchers to design chemical mechanisms for energy-efficient and carbon-neutral energy applications as well as to solve some of the nation’s other pressing problems in science and technology.”  

The award teams are led by universities and national laboratories. Projects were chosen by competitive peer review under a DOE Funding Opportunity Announcement open to universities, national laboratories, and other research organizations. The final details for each project award are subject to final negotiations between DOE and the awardees. 

Funding totals approximately $8.4 million in Fiscal Year 2021 dollars for projects of up to four years in duration, with outyear funding contingent on congressional appropriations. A list of projects can be found here.