The results of the first competition under the G8 Research Councils Initiative on Multilateral Research Funding have been released. Canadian scientists will participate in three of the six newly funded research projects that are focussed on developing a new generation of simulation software which will take advantage of the expected increases in computer processing speeds in the coming decade.
The grants are administered by NSERC and its counterparts from France, Germany, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States. The grants represent the first funding issued under this initiative (Italy, also part of the G8, did not participate in this round of the initiative). Each of the participating countries will fund its own researchers, with a total of $10 million issued over three years. NSERC funding totals just over $770,000.
The G8 Funding Initiative was launched in 2010 to support research on topics of global relevance that can best be tackled by a multinational approach. Researchers must work with at least three partners from three of the participating countries. The first call for proposals, on “Application Software towards Exascale Computing for Global Scale Issues,” was issued last year.
Summaries of the funded projects
Project Title | Lead Principal Investigator | Canadian Principal Investigator and University | Other Principal Investigators and Country | Total K€ | NSERC Contribution CAN$ |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
ExArch - Climate analytics on distributed exascale data archives | Martin Juckes, UK |
Paul Kushner, University of Toronto | V. Balaii, US |
1,439 | 231,455 |
Seismic Imaging – Modeling earthquakes and earth’s interior based upon exascale simulations of seismic wave propagation | Jeroen Tromp, US |
Qinya Liu, University of Toronto | D. Komatitsch, France | 775 | 273,000 |
ECS - Enabling climate simulation at extreme scale | Marc Snir, US |
Andrew Weaver, University of Victoria | F. Cappello, France |
1,250 | 266,900 |
ICOMEX - Icosahedral-grid Models for Exascale Earth System Simulations | Günther Zäng, Germany |
- | S. Reich, Germany |
1,031 | |
INGENIOUS - Using next generation computers and algorithms for modelling the dynamics of large biomolecular systems | Makoto Taiji, |
- | D. Nerukh, UK |
1,189 | |
Nu-FuSE - Nuclear fusion simulations at exascale | Graeme Ackland, |
- | X. Garbet, France |
1,750 | |
Total funding over three years | 771,355 |