ASCR User Facilities
The Advanced Scientific Computing Research program supports the operation of the following national scientific user facilities:
- Energy Sciences Network (ESnet):
The Energy Sciences Network, or ESnet, is the Department of Energy’s high-speed network that provides the high-bandwidth, reliable connections that link scientists at national laboratories, universities and other research institutions, enabling them to collaborate on some of the world's most important scientific challenges. Managed and operated by the ESnet staff at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, ESnet provides direct connections to more than 40 DOE sites at speeds up to 100 gigabits per second, allowing scientists to manage, share and analyze massive datasets that are the hallmark of 21st century science. Connectivity to the global Internet is maintained through "peering" arrangements with more than 100 other research and education networks. Funded principally by DOE's Office of Science, ESnet allows scientists to use unique DOE research facilities and computing resources independent of time and location with state-of-the-art performance levels. ESnet derives its effectiveness from the extensive cooperation it enjoys with its user community. It is one of the most widely based and successful cooperative efforts within the Department of Energy.
- Oak Ridge National Laboratory Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF):
The OLCF was established in 2004 and was charged with developing an unclassified computing resource 100 times more powerful than the systems of the day. Today the OLCF is home to Titan, a Cray XK7 computer system capable of 27 thousand trillion calculations per second—or 27 petaflops—the OLCF combines world-class staff with cutting-edge facilities and support systems. Titan, with 18,688 16-core AMD Opteron processors (Central Processing Units - CPUs) and NVIDIA accelerators (Graphical Processing Units - GPUs), 710 terabytes of memory, a 32-petabyte file system, and input/output bandwidth of one terabyte per second. is the United States' fastest and most powerful supercomputer dedicated to open scientific research. The center serves elite computational scientists from all areas of the research community through user programs such as the Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program and the Department of Energy’s ASCR Leadership Computing Challenge (ALCC) program, delivering state-of-the-art computing, data, visualization, and analytics resources to solve the world’s most challenging science problems. In 2013, nearly two billion processor hours on Titan were awarded to projects from universities, private industry, and government research laboratories, representing a wide array of scientific and engineering research, from climate science to critical materials discovery and to nuclear physics. The OLCF also provides a number of computing clusters for data analysis, a state-of-the-art data visualization laboratory, a data archive capable of storing dozens of petabytes of data, and most importantly, the experts to help the users make the most of these resources.
- Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF):
In operation since 2006, the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility houses world-class supercomputing resources for open science. It supports a wide range of science and engineering research and serves users from academia, industry, and the national laboratories. The ALCF provides comprehensive services from training to performance engineering to data analysis, and operates a unique catalyst program to assist the individual science teams to achieve optimal performance and results on ALCF systems from day one. Argonne's current supercomputing resource is Mira, a 10-petaflops IBM Blue Gene/Q system, consisting of 48 racks, 786,432 cores, and 768 terabytes of memory.. The center serves elite computational scientists from all areas of the research community through user programs such as the Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program and the Department of Energy’s ASCR Leadership Computing Challenge (ALCC) program, delivering state-of-the-art computing, data, visualization, and analytics resources to solve the world’s most challenging science problems.
- National Energy Research Scientific Computing (NERSC) Center:
The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) is the primary scientific computing facility for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science. As one of the largest facilities in the world devoted to providing computational resources and expertise for basic scientific research, NERSC is a world leader in accelerating scientific discovery through computation. Established in 1974, NERSC is a division of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, located in Berkeley, California. NERSC’s flagship supercomputer, nicknamed Edison, is a 124,800-core Cray XC30 with a peak speed of 2.39 petaflop/s (or 2,390,000,000,000,000 calculations per second).
More than 4,700 scientists use NERSC systems to perform basic scientific research on more than 600 projects spanning a wide range of disciplines, including climate change, new materials, cosmology, physics, protein structures and a host of other scientific endeavors. NERSC provides some of the largest computing and storage systems available anywhere, but what distinguishes the center is its success in creating an environment that makes these resources effective for scientific research. NERSC systems provide a state-of-the-art scientific development environment with the tools needed by the diverse community of NERSC users. NERSC offers scientists intellectual services that empower them to be more effective researchers, as evidenced by the fact that NERSC users consistently publish more than 1,500 peer-reviewed publications each year as a result of using NERSC systems. All research projects that are funded by the DOE Office of Science and require high performance computing support are eligible to apply to use NERSC resources. Projects that are not funded by the DOE Office of Science, but that conduct research that supports the Office of Science mission may also apply.
Last modified: 12/13/2013 2:36:23 PM