SciDAC began as a five-year program by the Department of Energy (DOE) in 2001 to develop the Scientific Computing Software and Hardware Infrastructure needed to use terascale computers to advance DOE research programs in basic energy sciences, biological and environmental research, fusion energy sciences, and high-energy and nuclear physics.

Scientific computing, including modeling and simulation, has become crucial for research problems that are insoluble by traditional theoretical and experimental approaches, hazardous to study in the laboratory, or time-consuming or expensive to solve by traditional means.

The DOE Office of Science (SC) has a long history of accomplishments in scientific computing and has often served as the proving ground for many new computer technologies.