The U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science awarded 95 million hours of computing time on supercomputers to 45 projects.

The awards, announced during a news conference Monday, are part of a program called Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment, or Incite. The DOE supercomputers will conduct research and design of virtual prototypes in weeks or months, rather than the years or decades the work would take on traditional computing systems, DOE said.

"The Department of Energy's Office of Science has one of the top 10 most powerful supercomputers in the world and four of the top 100, and we're proud to provide these resources to help researchers advance scientific knowledge and understanding," Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said in a prepared statement.

New industry recipients include Corning, Fluent, General Atomics, and Procter & Gamble. Boeing, DreamWorks Animation, General Atomics, and Pratt & Whitney received awards to continue projects from last year. Several university, government laboratories, and individual scientists also will receive computing time through the program.

DOE chose projects in a wide range of areas -- including aeronautics, astrophysics, accelerator physics, chemical sciences, climate research, computer science, consumer products, combustion research, engineering physics, environmental science, fusion energy, life sciences, materials science, nuclear physics, and nuclear engineering.

DOE awarded the computing hours based on the projects' suitability for use of supercomputers and potential impacts. The research aims to design quieter cars, improve commercial aircraft design, advance fusion energy, understand nanomaterials, and further studies of supernova and global climate change and the causes of Parkinson's disease.

"One of the most important aspects of the Incite program is that the resulting knowledge will largely be available, so that the information and technologies can be used by other researchers, further broadening the impact of this work," Undersecretary for Science Raymond Orbach said in a prepared statement. "Our scientific leadership underpins nearly every aspect of our economy and by making these resources available to a broad range of science and engineering disciplines, we believe the resulting work will make us more competitive in the years and decades to come."

It would take more than 114 years to run 1 million processing hours on a single-processor desktop computer. A project receiving 1 million supercomputing hours from DOE would run on 2,000 processors for 500 hours, or about 21 days.

Editor's note: The last paragraph was corrected on Jan. 17 to change 114 hours to 114 years.