Hardware
The Molecular Science Computing Facility (MSCF) is located on the PNNL campus in the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, a US Department of Energy national user facility, and it provides a variety of computers and computing resources, including massively parallel computers, SGI, Sun, and Linux workstations, data archive systems and a Graphics and Visualization Laboratory.
A Hewlett-Packard Linux-based computer is contained in the MSCF's High-Performance Computing Center. The High-Performance Computing System-2 (MPP2) provides a balanced supercomputer with a theoretical peak performance of 11.8 Teraflops with 6.8 Terabytes of RAM and 256 Terabytes of disk. The system is connected to the lab via multiple Gigabit Ethernet connections allowing users to perform remote visualizations and transfer data to remote storage. The current EMSL archive has greater than 25 Terabytes of storage and has the ability to grow to over a Petabyte. The archive uses a unique approach to disk storage by clustering many low cost commodity disks to provide fault tolerant high performance storage.
The Advanced Computing Technology Laboratory (ACTL) is a virtual research laboratory recently formed to investigate and evaluate key technology components and emerging high-end systems for data-intensive computing. The ACTL is also primarily housed within the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, and includes two SGI Altix supercomputers, a Cray XD1, a storage system for bioinformatics research, a testbed with advanced interconnects, and a64-CPU IBM Power-5 server. The technologies available within ACTL are the FPGA; MD-GRAPE (an accelerator board for molecular dynamics calculations); the latest Infiniband, Myrinet and Quadrics networks; and evaporative cooling provided by Isothermal Systems Research, Inc.
Contact: Kevin Regimbal