Council on Competitiveness Praises Department of Energy on Decision to Again Include Industry Participation in INCITE Program.

WASHINGTON -- DOE Decision to Drive Greater Industry Inclusion Critical to US Private Sector Global Competitiveness in 21st Century

The Council on Competitiveness today praised the decision by the Department of Energy (DOE) to once again include industry participation in its Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program. The DOE announced on Thursday a new "call for proposals" for this path breaking program, inviting US businesses to submit proposals to utilize the DOE's most powerful high performance computers. These systems are located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and Argonne National Laboratory. In addition, the Council complimented DOE on substantially increasing the amount of time it is making available on these advanced computers.

The DOE initially began accepting proposals from industry leaders for this program in 2005, as encouraged in reports and case studies by the High Performance Computing Initiative of the Council on Competitiveness. The Council is a non-partisan group which works closely with its members in industry, academia and government to ensure the US's ongoing competitiveness advantage.

"Use of high performance computing is critical to the ability of US industry to maintain and extend its global competitive advantage, as evidenced by the comments of President Bush in this year's State of the Union address," said Council on Competitiveness President Deborah L. Wince Smith. "The Council believes we must "out-compute to out-compete," and expanding access to and use of high performance computers is one of our key missions. By offering greater access to its systems, the DOE is advancing important science and the competitive interests of the country. We applaud the DOE's latest actions in this area."

High Performance Computing Initiative

The Council's High Performance Computing Initiative has galvanized a dialogue among government agencies, system and software developers and private sector users of high performance computing to leverage government R&D investment in this technology and facilitate wider usage across the private sector to propel innovation and competitiveness. As part of the initiative, the Council convenes an annual High Performance Computing Users Conference to share the results and findings from case studies, surveys and interviews to identify application needs that cut across sectors and to assess the impact of this technology on industry productivity. The next conference will be held on September 7 in Washington DC.

For more information on the Council's upcoming High Performance Computing Users Conference please visit www.hpcusersconference.com.

For more information on the Council's High Performance Computing Initiative, please visit http://www.compete.org/hpc.

For more information on the INCITE program and request for proposals, please visit http://hpc.science.doe.gov/allocations/incite/.

About The Council on Competitiveness

An organization of the top business, university and labor leaders in the United States, the Council on Competitiveness is responsible for influencing the course of American competitiveness on regional, national and global scales. The Council stands unique in its ability to anticipate and respond to changing economic conditions through a series of comprehensive programs to maintain competitiveness and security, support innovation, benchmark national competitiveness and shape public policy. Information about the Council is available on the Web at http://www.compete.org.