National Leadership Computing Facility

The National Leadership Computing Facility, or NLCF for short, is a designated user facility operated by Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Department of Energy. It contains several supercomputers, the largest of which is a Cray XT5 system named Jaguar, which was ranked 1st on the TOP500 list of world's fastest supercomputers as of November 2009. It is located in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

History

NLCF was founded in 1992 at Oak Ridge National Laboratory to advance the state of the art in high-performance computing (HPC) by bringing a new generation of parallel computers out of the laboratory and into the hands of the scientists who could most use them. then called the Center for Computational Sciences or CCS and consisting of a Intel Paragon computer. Over time, it expanded to contain many superacomputers including the Intel Paragon, an IBM system based on the POWER3, an IBM system based on the POWER4, SGI Altix, and more recently, the Cray X1E, Cray XD1, Cray XT3 and Cray XT4.

The NLCF is a collaboration of the DOE-SC and a world-class team from national laboratories, research institutions, computing centers, universities, and vendors. It evaluates and deploys technology designed to maximize the performance of scientific applications and engages the scientific and engineering communities for the purpose of advancing science and technology research in our nation. To accomplish this, the NLCF has developed and implemented a three-pronged strategy for building and engaging the research communities to define critical computational needs, work with the manufacturers of HPC resources to express and meet those needs, and develop the tools and algorithms to best take advantage of the HPC resources.

Computers and projects

NLCF's fastest computer, Jaguar is a 119TF Cray XT4 with 11,508 AMD Opteron processors and runs on the Linux operating system. Other computers at NLCF are Phoenix (18TF Cray X1). The facility also contains a 5 petabyte High Performance Storage System (HPSS).

NLCF facilities are accessible through the Energy Sciences Network or ESnet, and the NSF TeraGrid.

Resources of the National Leadership Computing Facility are dedicated to a limited number of high-impact, grand challenge scale projects. Calls for proposals are initiated throughout the year and large, multi-institution proposals are considered. 95% of the NCCS's Leadership Computing Facility resources are dedicated to these projects. Participants my inquire about joining an existing project by contacting the project's Principal Investigator.

Participants may propose a new project (https://secure.ccs.ornl.gov/new_request.html). Please review the Project Application Steps (https://secure.ccs.ornl.gov/project_steps.html) for additional information and processing required before a project can be created.

Access to resources is given to approved participants of allocated projects. Project members are given the ability to run jobs against their project’s allocation. To request an account, complete the new account (https://secure.ccs.ornl.gov/request.new.html) application form. Please review the Account Application Steps (https://secure.ccs.ornl.gov/acct_steps.html)for additional information and processing required before an account can be created.

External links

• NLCF main website