The Laboratory Computing Resource Center (LCRC) at Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) fosters and facilitates HPC partnership between ANL and industry. The primary goal of the ANL-industry partnership is to transfer state-of-the-art computing and computational methodologies to companies developing technologies that support DOE missions.
This partnership allows ANL researchers and industry partners to jointly advance the use of HPC tools and best practices in the industry. Furthermore, this partnership aims to accelerate technology transfer to the industry in areas of interest to DoE (energy production/transmission, advanced manufacturing, renewable energy sources, nanoscience and technology and transportation). Industrial collaborators must have an active collaboration with an ANL researcher to avail of computational resources at LCRC. This partnership is/can be conducted along two main lines: (a) Open-science projects, and (b) Proprietary/production projects.
Open-Science Projects
ANL researchers team up with industry partners on open-science projects requiring considerable computational resources. Problems that show strong scaling (> 70% parallel efficiency) on up to 256 (or 512) cores with a wall-time of up to 48 hours are ideally suited for LCRC clusters. Time allocation for industry projects can be requested throughout the year.
A typical industry allocation is between 100,000 to 500,000 core-hours. This allocation is primarily targeted towards testing new computational methods, better models, higher-fidelity and/or larger-scale simulations than the current best-practices in the industry. LCRC provides the most up-to-date software installations and hardware (computing cores, storage, networks, etc.) to facilitate such studies. The ANL-industry team publishes the results of these simulations in open-literature to benefit the broader science/engineering community.
Industry partners can benefit from this partnership in the following ways. Industry partners can use the results of these open-science projects to evaluate the impact/pay-off of HPC on increasing energy and cost efficiency, productivity, reliability and safety, and reducing design margins/time-to-market, among other metrics. Since LCRC uses commodity clusters, industry partners can seamlessly transfer codes and software developments on their internal clusters for future in-house research (if need be) or avail of the LCRC computing resources for proprietary projects as discussed next.
Proprietary/Production Projects
Based on the success/impact of the open-science collaborative projects, industry partners can use LCRC resources for proprietary research or large sets of production simulations for internal design and/or product development purposes. Core-hours required for these proprietary projects are charged at a rate consistent with the current DoE practices and guidelines. ANL project PIs can contact LCRC ([email protected]) for more details on pricing, storage and ANL/DoE policies. Industry partners are not required to publish results for proprietary projects. These simulations can be conducted by ANL researchers (via a WFO/CRADA) or solely by the industry personnel. Core-hour cost charged by ANL/DoE does not cover the cost of licensing fees required by commercial codes. The industry partners are encouraged to work with the vendor to complete licensing requirements needed to run on LCRC clusters.
Alternately, ANL project PIs can avail of the hotel-condo hosting option to conduct open-science and/or proprietary projects. Industry proprietary work involving Argonne staff can be done on a full cost recovery basis, using the standard DOE-approved method for computing costs. PIs and industry partners can avail of the hotel-condo option to run proprietary projects as well. PIs should notify LCRC about the core-hours used exclusively for proprietary projects to enable full cost recovery.
Please use the links provided below to get started. Please contact [email protected] for more information on the core-hour costs for proprietary projects.
