May 12, 2004
Memo from Horst Simon on Leadership Class Computing

Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham will announce later today that a proposal submitted by Oak Ridge National Laboratory has been chosen by the Department of Energy for the development and deployment of a "Leadership Class" Computing System (LCS). Berkeley Lab, as well as Brookhaven National Lab and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, also submitted LCS proposals. The focus of this project will be on capability computing in support of high-end science, rather than on enhanced computing capacity for general science users.

Although this decision is obviously a disappointment for those of us at LBNL, I would like to congratulate ORNL and wish them success in their project. I am looking forward to working with ORNL   and OASCR to make the facility a success for the DOE mission and for computational science in the country.

I believe that Berkeley Lab fielded a very credible and cost-effective proposal with our partners, including IBM, LLNL, the NSF computing centers in San Diego and Illinois, PNNL, numerous universities, NASA and other organizations. At the heart of our proposal was the concept of "Science-Driven Computer Architecture," which aims to change the ways computing systems are built for science. This approach is already being implemented in the development of the ASCI Purple system being built by IBM for installation at LLNL.

I would like to again thank all the staff members who helped with the proposal, especially those core team members who came in early, stayed late and worked weekends to get the job done. Thanks to Core Proposal Team members Bill Kramer, Bill Saphir, David Bailey, Lenny Oliker, John Shalf and John Hules; the Applications Team of   John Bell, Julian Borrill, Andrew Canning, Phil Colella, Marc Day, Peter Nugent, David Serafini, Lin-Wang Wang and Michael Wehner; Jon Bashor, Roxanne Clark, Bill Fortney, Heidi Hallet, and Flavio Robles of Computing Sciences; Michael Chartock, Reid Edwards and Rob Johnson of the Director's Office; and the Facilities Department, and to everyone else in the lab who supported us in the last ten weeks.

NERSC continues to be a world leader in computational science and one of the most   important facilities in the Office of Science.   We will need to focus our energies to maintain NERSC's excellence and assure its continued success in the future.

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