The College of Sciences is providing project leadership on a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) cooperative agreement intended to revolutionize the ability of scientists to take advantage of the world's most powerful computers.

The university will conduct algorithmic research, create software and provide consulting on its use throughout the DOE national laboratory complex, together with five other universities and computational groups at three national laboratories.

The five-year, nine-institution contract is worth approximately $18 million overall. Old Dominion will receive $1 million for its portion, which consists of technical direction of the overall effort and algorithmic work on large-scale systems of equations. (An algorithm is a predetermined set of instructions for solving a given problem in a finite number of steps.)

David Keyes, Richard F. Barry Professor and chair of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, will head the project and is the principal investigator for the Old Dominion portion of it.