Douglas Alexander: “Yesterday Secretary Abraham of the Department of Energy announced that Oak Ridge National Laboratory in my home State of…”

“Yesterday Secretary Abraham of the Department of Energy announced that Oak Ridge National Laboratory in my home State of Tennessee was selected the winner of the Department of Energy's competition to develop a leadership class computational facility. To put that in plain English, that means the Oak Ridge Laboratory, being one of the most famous names in science in the world, will lead an effort that includes many of the brightest minds in our country to try to regain leadership in high-speed and advanced computing for the United States of America. Oak Ridge, because of this competition, will receive $25 million in funding from the Department of Energy this year for developing this leadership class facility, and the Department has requested an additional $25 million for this activity for next year. Secretary Abraham's decision will put the United States back in the leadership position in high-performance computing by supporting the development of a 50-teraflop high-end computing facility capable of performing 50 trillion calculations per second. Why is that important to us? It will permit us in this country to address many scientific problems.”