Leadership Computing at the National Center for Computational Science: An Enabling Partner for Breakthrough Science

In May 2004, the National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory was selected as the Leadership Computing Facility (LCF) by the U.S. Department of Energy. During the fall of 2008 NCCS installed the latest in a series of upgrades to the LCF, a 1.38 PF Cray XT-5, the most powerful general-purpose computational platform dedicated to open science in the world. This talk will review the evolution of Leadership Computing at the NCCS and how it has grown to be an important partner in the pursuit of breakthrough computational science. The Oak Ridge National Laboratory Leadership Computing Facility provides a large fraction of the computational resources to investigators selected for participation in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program, which supports computationally intensive, large-scale scientific research projects.  This resource has grown steadily delivering 145M hours in CY08, over 380M hours in CY09, and expected to grow to over 700M hours in 2010. This talk will discuss several of the INCITE projects supported by the NCCS, and will provide a preview of plans for continuing to expand the capabilities of the center.