The U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory, located on the ISU campus, is one of 30 recipients of a $60 million dollar grant from the Department of Energy. The lab will receive $1.5 million during the next three years.

The grant that Ames Lab will receive is from the Scientific Discovery Through Advanced Computing-2, or SciDAC-2 program, which is sponsored by the Department of Energy’s Advanced Scientific Computing Research Program.

Ames Lab has been working with three computational chemistry software codes, and they plan to use the grant money to conduct further research on these codes.

Getting these codes to communicate is a difficult task. Combined, the three codes have about 4 million lines of code.

“One of the things that we’re trying to do is to have a way of each of these codes communicating to one another so we can actually accomplish new science,” said Theresa Windus, professor of chemistry. “Each code has a different strength, and what we want to do is combine our forces so that we can bring out some great science and technical capabilities.”

Although the project works mainly in pure science, “The applications that we use these tools for can be very, very practical,” said Mark Gordon, distinguished professor of chemistry and program director of Applied Mathematics and Computational Sciences for Ames Lab.

Ames Lab researchers are also motivated by curiosity about the scientific world around them.

“There are academic questions that we just want to know the answers to. I mean, we just have this great curiosity; we want to know how things work,” Windus said.

Gordon said the research that the lab conducts can be used for environmental cleanup and alternative energy sources.

The Department of Energy has been trying to open communications between its two divisions, which are basic energy sciences and advanced scientific computing research. A request went out for proposals in the area of merging these two divisions.

The proposal was put into motion when Gordon and Windus, both with backgrounds in chemistry and physics, began working with Masha Sosonkina, a computer scientist for the Department of Energy.

Ames Lab has big plans for future projects.

Gordon is currently working on research using ionic liquids as alternative fuels for the United States Air Force. The Department of Energy has requested proposals for researching hydrogen cells as an alternative fuel.

Ames Lab was allowed to submit four papers about different ways to research hydrogen cells. researchers recently found out that one of their papers has been encouraged by the Department of Energy to become a proposal and are hopeful they will receive a grant for this in the future.