In 2004, the U.S. Department of Energy created the Leadership
Computing Facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory with the mission of
providing the most powerful computers in the world for open, scientific
computing. Late this year, ORNL will deliver a 1 petaflops computer
system that is allocated to the science community through the DOE INCITE
program. ORNL is also collaborating with the University of
Tennessee’s National Institute for Computational Sciences to
deliver a 1 petaflops computer system to the academic computing world through
an award from the National Science Foundation. In addition,
ORNL is working with the Department of Defense to support the system software
and applications for the next generation of supercomputers to be delivered
under the DARPA HPCS program. To support all of
these systems, ORNL has 70,000 square feet of computer rooms today, and is
planning further expansions. This talk will discuss each of these
projects, the scientific results that have been achieved, and some of the
challenges along the way.