Planting seeds to unlock
thorny ethanol enigma
Posted February 26, 2009
Jeremy Smith and his fellow researchers have new fuel for understanding the barriers that keep biomass from becoming an economical source of ethanol.
Smith, director of the Center for Molecular Biophysics (CMB), an Oak Ridge National Laboratory-University of Tennessee (ORNL-UT) joint project, and his colleagues create computational models of lignocellulose. Those models could help us understand what makes this tough biomass component so difficult to break down into sugars for conversion to ethanol.
If researchers can overcome lignocellulose recalcitrance, plant stems and leaves and wood chips could become a major feedstock for the ethanol America needs to cut greenhouse gas emissions and foreign oil imports. Currently, most ethanol is produced from food crops like corn, which net smaller greenhouse gas reductions than biomass conversion and interfere with food supplies.
To run its models, the group has an allocation of 6 million processor hours through the Department of Energy (DOE) 2009 Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program. It's a renewal of a 2008 INCITE grant of 3.5 million hours.
The CMB has projects in DOE's BioEnergy Science Center (BESC), an interdisciplinary coalition of experts from ORNL, UT and other universities, corporations and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). BESC, which is supported by the department's Office of Biological and Environmental Research, is designed to achieve breakthroughs in biofuels from lignocellulosic biomass.
Both grants have provided time on what is now the world's most powerful computer for unclassified research, ORNL's Jaguar. The computer is a Cray XT that was upgraded in 2008 to a peak processing speed of 1.6 petaflops – 1.6 quadrillion calculations a second. Now Smith's group has snagged another 20 million hours on Jaguar as part of an "early user" program to run high-impact science projects in the supercomputer's first six months of operation.
With that much time on such a powerful computer, "We can simulate the systems we're interested in in more exquisite detail, with higher accuracy," says Smith, who also is the first UT-ORNL Governor's Chair. "At the same time we can simulate larger systems and for longer times." The power of parallel processing
Running a single processor for 1 million hours would take about 114 years. But massively parallel computers like Jaguar break big tasks into smaller parts and parcel them out to thousands of computer processors. The processors work on the pieces simultaneously and their output is assembled into a solution.
