From cracks to climate

The advent of PetaFlop (and eventually ExaFlop) computational architectures opens new opportunities for simulations, equalizing their importance with experiment and theory for scientific discovery. The INCITE (Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment) program of the U.S. Department of Energy opens these facilities to all, based solely on the intellectual content of the proposed work. In such an environment, significant advances can be made in a number of scientific fields. Three are examined in this presentation: 1) Scaling from atomic displacements to cracks, 2) Systems approach to the CO₂ balance sheet, and 3) Inclusion of human behavior into integrated climate models. High end computing enables each of these areas to predict consequences of wide spread interest and impact.