Hello everybody,
We’ve been overdue for another progress report on the Clean Energy Project for some time, so here it finally comes. We hope you’ll enjoy this summary of the things that have happened since our last full report in April.
Let’s start with the news on the CEP team again: Last time we reported that Alan was promoted to Full Professor and Sule got a job as an Assistant Professor in Ankara (Turkey). In the meantime, Johannes also landed an Assistant Professorship in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, with an affiliation to the New York State Center of Excellence in Materials Informatics.
http://www.cbe.buffalo.edu/people/full_time/j_hachmann.php
Johannes will, however, stay involved in the Clean Energy Project and has already recruited students at Buffalo who will strengthen the CEP research efforts. Laszlo is gearing up to go out into the world as well and he will start graduate school next summer.
http://aspuru.chem.harvard.edu/laszlo-seress/
To compensate these losses, Ed Pyzer-Knapp from the Day Group at the University of Cambridge (UK) will join the CEP team in January 2014.
http://www-day.ch.cam.ac.uk/epk.html
Prof. Carlos Amador-Bedolla from UNAM in Mexico, who was active in the project a few years ago, has also started to be more active again.
http://www.quimica.unam.mx/ficha_investigador.php?ID=77&tipo=2
Continuity is always a big concern in a large-scale project such as the CEP, but we hope that we’ll manage the transition without too much trouble. Having the additional project branch in Buffalo will hopefully put our work on a broader foundation in the long run.
Our work in the CEP was again recognized, e.g., by winning the 2013 Computerworld Data+ Award and the RSC Scholarship Award for Scientific Excellence of the ACS Division of Chemical Information for Johannes. CEP work has been presented on many conferences, webcasts, seminars, and talks over the last half year. It is by now a fairly well known effort in the materials science community and it has taken its place amongst the other big virtual screening projects such as the Materials Project, the Computational Materials Repository, and AFLOWLIB.
Now to the progress on the research front: After a number of the other WCG projects have concluded, the CEP has seen a dramatic increase in computing time and returned results since the spring. These days we average between 24 and 28 y/d (that’s an increase of about 50% to our previous averages) and we have passed the mark of 21,000 years of harvested CPU time. By now we have performed over 200 million density functional theory calculations on over 3 million compounds, accumulating well over half a petabyte of data. We are currently in the process of expanding our storage capacity towards the 1PB mark by building Jabba 7 and 8. Thanks again to HGST for their generous sponsorship and Harvard FAS Research Computing for their support.
Over the summer we have finally released the CEPDB on our new platform
www.molecularspace.org. The launch made quite a splash. We received a lot of positive feedback in the news and from the community, and it was also nicely synchronized with the two year anniversary of the Materials Genome Initiative. We used the CEPDB release to also launched our new project webpage.
Our latest research results and data analysis was published in “Energy and Environmental Science” and you can read all the details in this paper.
There is still a lot of exciting research waiting to be done, and we are looking forward to tackling all this work together with you. Thanks so much for all your generous support, hard work, and enthusiasm – you guys and gals are the best! CEP would not be possible without you. CRUNCH ON!
Best wishes from
Your Harvard Clean Energy Project team
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