Overview
The National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) provides the most powerful computing resources in the world for open scientific research. It is one of the world’s premier science facilities—an unparalled research environment that supports dramatic advances in understanding how the physical world works and using that knowledge to address our most pressing national and international concerns.
The NCCS was founded in 1992 to advance the state of the art in high-performance computing by putting new generations of powerful parallel supercomputers into the hands of the scientists who can use them the most productively. It is a managed activity of the Advanced Scientific Computing Research program of the Department of Energy Office of Science (DOE-SC) and is located at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
NCCS has all the ingredients necessary to enable revolutionary science: an exciting research program led by top scientists, a talented staff, leading-edge technology, fruitful partnerships with other research institutions and industry, and state-of-the-art computing facilities and infrastructure.
The Center is host to the Cray XT4 “Jaguar” supercomputer, ranked
No. 2 on the Top500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers in 2007. Jaguar is actually the most powerful supercomputer in the world for open scientific use. Its peak performance is more than 119 trillion calculations per second (119 teraflops). To support its extraordinary concentration of computing power, the NCCS has put in place high-speed fiber-optic networks to expedite data movement, a scientific visualization center that enables researchers to analyze their simulation results quickly and comprehensively, and a high-performance data archiving and retrieval system.
The NCCS continues to aggressively expand its computing power. Steps are under way to expand the speed of the Jaguar to 250 teraflops in 2008 and in 2009 to install a petaflops computer, capable of a quadrillion calculations per second.
NCCS hosts only those projects capable of producing groundbreaking results. Each year a few research efforts that require enormous computing resources to realize their promise are rewarded allocations of computing time that reach as much as several million processor-hours. Such unprecedented levels of computational power are key to cracking fundamental questions that underlie issues of vital importance such as designing fusion reactors that provide clean, virtually unlimited energy; engineering proteins to provide new therapies for diseases and release energy from biomass efficiently; making wise choices to protect our planet and avoid runaway climate change; and designing new materials with specialized properties.
Great scientific advances will happen because of the work being done at the NCCS, and they will change our world for the better.