Plainsboro, New Jersey - Four research projects involving six scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have been awarded a total of 111 million processor hours on supercomputers at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee. The researchers will be using the time for fusion energy-related research regarding plasma turbulence simulations. Plasma is a hot, gaseous state of matter used as the fuel to produce fusion energy - the power source of the sun and the stars.

The PPPL projects are among 69 receiving a total of 1.6 billion supercomputing processor hours through the 2010 Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program for large-scale, computationally intensive projects. The Department of Energy recently announced these awards for thirty-four new and 35 renewal projects to have access to some of the world's most powerful supercomputers at DOE national laboratories. This is the seventh year the INCITE program has awarded time on DOE supercomputers to universities, laboratories, other government agencies and industry.

"Computation and supercomputing are critical to solving some of our greatest scientific challenges," said Energy Secretary Steven Chu. "This year's INCITE awards reflect the enormous growth in demand for complex modeling and simulation capabilities, which are essential to improving our economic prosperity and global competitiveness."

Physicists Stephane Ethier, Greg Hammett, W.W. Lee, David Mikkelsen, William Tang, and Weixing Wang are the PPPL scientists involved in projects awarded. Ethier is a Raritan Borough resident, Hammett is a Plainsboro Township resident, and Lee, Mikkelsen, Tang, and Wang are Princeton Township residents.

PPPL Director Stewart Prager said, "These awards focus on the grand challenge problem of understanding turbulence in plasmas at small spatial scale and how it influences behavior of a large, hot fusion plasma. This understanding will affect our progress toward fusion, but have impact for turbulent behavior in other venues, such as astronomical plasmas."