Research Councils from seven of the G8 nations have announced a five-year joint funding program to address major international challenges. The Multilateral Research Funding Initiative will announce a series of calls for funding to tackle global issues such as climate change, energy security, water shortages and the conservation of the environment.

The first call in this programme has just been announced:

Interdisciplinary Program on Application Software towards Exascale Computing for Global Scale Issues

From the call document:

Simulation supported by high performance computing infrastructures has become the third pillar of science, complementary to experimentation and modeling. Major challenges of the 21st century such as climate change, energy, water, environment, or natural disasters can be addressed by high performance numerical and symbolic simulations that are both data and computer intensive. Computing resources required for these simulations, including improved model resolution, model physics, data analysis and visualization, will reach the exascale (1018 operations per second) level by 2020. However, taking full advantage of these re-sources for global scale scientific challenges will rely on application software featuring fun-damentally new algorithms and data structures capable of exploiting the massive parallelism underlying future exascale level computing.

This international program aims at supporting collaborations between experts in research areas related to these global challenges and developers of future exascale platforms, so that they address together the relevant needs of the research community during the early design stages of emerging new computing systems.

RCUK have issued further guidance (PDF) for UK researchers interested in applying to this scheme. There are two deadlines: the first, for preliminary outline proposals, is 7th May 2010; the second, for full stage applications, is 25th August 2010.