National Center for Computational Sciences

INSTRUCTIONS

To submit a proposal for Early Access Science-at-Scale Pioneering Applications, go to http://www.nccs.gov/user-support/access/project-request) and fill out each section with sufficient detail to enable a thorough peer review of the proposed work. For “Identify a project type” select “Other” and type in “Petascale Early Access.” For “Project Duration” state 6 months. For “Job Characterization” include core count and wall clock per job, estimated.

ANNOUNCEMENT

Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is currently seeking applications for early access on its newest petascale system at the ORNL National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS). NCCS (www.nccs.gov) was established in 1992 and in 2004 was designated a Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science Leadership Computing Facility (LCF) for the nation. Its mission is to provide unclassified research in an unparalleled environment for new discoveries that will dramatically impact the nation’s ability to produce a secure and environmentally clean energy economy and increase mankind’s understanding of our world.

The aim of early access allocations is to test the limits of this one-of-a-kind system while conducting state-of-the-art scientific research. ORNL is seeking high impact breakthrough science that can only be performed at the petascale with applications that typically utilize a large fraction of the entire system for single simulations runs. All areas of science are open for consideration, including computer science performance and benchmarking studies.

The new Cray XT5 petascale system (”Jaguar”) at the NCCS will contain over 13000 compute nodes (over 100,000 cores) for a total aggregate memory of 300 TB and a peak performance of more than one petaflop. Each compute node consists of two 2.3 GHz quad-core AMD Opteron processors, 16 GB of DDR2 memory, and is connected to a Cray SeaStar2+ router. The SeaStar2+ routers are connected in a 3D torus topology, providing for a very high-bandwidth, low-latency, highly scalable environment. All compute nodes will run CLE (Cray Linux Environment), the same OS currently used on the XT4.

Early access allocation requests requiring up to weeks of dedicated full machine use will be considered. The Jaguar system is expected to be available for early access for approximately 6 months starting in early 2009, although immediate access is possible on a case-by-case basis.