The US Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Science has announced a new $23 million research and development program led by Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL).

Dubbed New Frontiers, the initiative will see a team led by ORNL source R&D proposals across the areas of hardware, software, and critical technologies with a focus on energy efficiency.

Funding for the program is being provided by the DOE Office of Science’s Advanced Scientific Computing Research Program, with technologies targeted for production over a five to ten-year time period, and will include a 40 percent cost-share option.

According to the DOE, New Frontiers will push strategic advancements in the high-performance computing field during the exascale era, which the department says will be essential in helping it maintain leadership and address the future challenges in science, energy, health, and growing security threats.

“With Dennard scaling long dead and the slowing of Moore’s law, we’re seeing technologies critical to HPC consuming more power that partially offset increases in application performance due to improvements in silicon process nodes and improved packaging techniques,” said ORNL’s Christopher Zimmer, New Frontiers project director.

“Current technology trends threaten to have a disruptive and costly impact on the development of DOE applications and potentially a negative impact on the productivity of DOE scientists.”

ORNL’s Al Geist, director of the Frontier project, added: “Energy efficiency is becoming critical to building future generations of leadership-scale computers and will involve development of new approaches to hardware, software, and application algorithms."

The Office of Science is home to three of the top 10 fastest supercomputers in the world: the 1.206 exaflops Frontier and the 200 petaflops Summit at ORNL; and the 1.012 exaflops Aurora at Argonne National Laboratory, which is expected to exceed two exaflops after optimization.