SDSC’s Trestles Supercomputer Speeds Clean Energy Research
The Clean Energy Project team at Harvard University. From left to right: Roberto Olivares-Amaya, Suleyman Er, Johannes Hachmann, and Alán Aspuru-Guzik. Image courtesy of CEP. A team of Harvard University researchers has been allocated time on the Trestles supercomputer at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego to perform computational calculations with the goal of creating the next generation of organic solar cells as an inexpensive and efficient source of energy. The allocation is a key part of the team's efforts to conduct larger, data-intensive computations related to its Clean Energy Project (CEP) , which combines the group's computational chemistry expertise with the large, distributed computing power of IBM's World Community Grid (WCG). Specifically, the CEP combines theory, computation, experiments, and grid computing by harvesting idle computing time from donors around the world using the WCG to perform ab initio computational quantum chemistry calculations on a large number of candidate molecules that could potentially form the next generation of solar cells. The complete CEP database will soon be made publicly available to the scientific community.
