Need faster hardware for an upcoming project? The Department of Energy's Office of Science is giving away time on its supercomputers. The agency says it has awarded 265 million processor-hours to 55 scientific projects in 2008, the largest amount of supercomputing time in its history. Projects are chosen based on their potential breakthroughs in science and engineering research and the project's suitability for using supercomputers. Access to the hardware lets winners conduct research in weeks or months, rather than years.

Allocations of supercomputing and data-storage resources will be made under the agency's Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment or Incite program, which supports computationally intensive, large-scale research projects.

Now in its fifth year, Incite lets scientists at national labs, universities, and industry tackle a wide range of scientific challenges such as studying protein folding to improve disease treatment and prevention, develop future energy sources, and simulating combustion chemistry. Biology applications in this year's Incite winner included studying causes of Parkinson's disease, simulating electrical activity in the heart, and understanding protein membranes. The next round of competition will be announced this summer. Expansion of the DOE Office of Science's computational capabilities should almost quadruple the 2009 Incite award allocations to close to a billion processor hours.