DOE's Center for Computational Sciences at ORNL leads a partnership that will provide
America with the world's fastest scientific computing facility.
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![Click image for larger view.](graphics/article02_abraham.jpg)
Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham adds his signature to the first Cray
X1 cabinet at CCS along with that of others including President
George W. Bush.
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Thanks in
part to a $300 million modernization program, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
has the largest facility for computational science research supported
by the Department of Energy's Office of Advanced Scientific Computing
Research. DOE's Center for Computational Sciences (CCS) at ORNL is
paving the way for groundbreaking scientific and technical accomplishments
in the 21st century.
Because ORNL has the people,
the computational resources, and the infrastructure. DOE selected CCS to lead a partnership
with a goal of creating the world's most powerful supercomputer by 2007. CCS will host the
National Leadership Computing Facility (NLCF), and ORNL will execute a plan that will pool
the partnership's computational resources to achieve a sustained capacity of 100 trillion
calculations per second (teraflops or TF). The NLCF partnership's plan is to surpass the
world's current fastest supercomputer, Japan's 40-TF Earth Simulator, by 2005.
The current
ORNL Cray X1 computer will be boosted to 20 TF. A 20-TF Cray Red Storm-based
machine will be added in 2005 when a key member of the partnership,
DOE's Argonne National Laboratory, will install a 5-teraflop IBM Blue
Gene computer. In 2006 the 100-TF Cray X2 supercomputer will be installed
at CCS, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and
industrial partners will help boost the NLCF's peak computing capacity
to 250 TF by 2007.
ORNL has
gathered some of the finest experimental researchers and theorists,
as well as some of the best analytical and computational tools, in
the world. The Laboratory now boasts the world's highest-resolution
electron microscope. With the completion in 2006 of the Spallation
Neutron Source, Oak Ridge will be the world leader in neutron science.
Supporting these and other assets, CCS supercomputers can perform 13.4
TF and will quadruple that computational speed in the near future.
![](graphics/article02_bkg.jpg)
Signatures to the first Cray
X1 cabinet at CCS.
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ORNL's
new computational facilities house not only unclassified leadership-class
supercomputers but also state-of-the-art data storage. The
150,000 sq. ft computational sciences building has space to spare for
adding numerous cabinets of processors to greatly increase
the computational speed and scientific modeling capability of CCS supercomputers.
The CCS
also serves as an evaluation center. ORNL scientists evaluate different
supercomputer architectures to determine which science codes work best
on the flagship supercomputer (Cray X1) and which ones work better
on IBM or SGI Altix supercomputers. These experts advise vendors on
how to design next-generation supercomputers to improve scientific
productivity. Researchers develop software tools that enable CCS supercomputers
to run science codes more efficiently.
ORNL's
computational facilities are bolstered by state-of-the-art connectivity,
with a strong research capability for building even better and faster
networks to connect CCS supercomputers with national networks and with
links to Atlanta, Memphis, Chicago, the Research Triangle, and other
sites. These networks will enable industrial firms to collaborate more
efficiently with ORNL researchers on projects of interest to industry.
Also at CCS, first-class visualization expertise and equipment help
researchers obtain insights from their calculation results and communicate
their significance.
Attracting
the Best and the Brightest
Many of
the world's best computational researchers are coming to Oak Ridge.
The promise of new facilities and new research opportunities is attracting
bright young computational scientists, such as our new Alston S. Householder
Fellow, Jennifer Ryan, and our new Eugene P. Wigner Fellow, Thomas
Maier. At the University of Tennessee—ORNL Joint Institute for
Computational Sciences (JICS), housed in a new building on the modern
ORNL campus, some 30 joint faculty appointments will be available to
attract the best and brightest university instructors who conduct research
in the computational sciences. More than 40 science and technology
staff members, 56 postdoctoral researchers, 46 graduate students, and
a dozen joint appointments were recently attracted to CCS.
Combining
experiment, theory, and computational simulation, ORNL researchers
in collaboration with peers from partner universities and other organizations
are conducting outstanding science. Collaborating groups are making
discoveries in biology, climate, materials, fusion, nanoscience, and
astrophysics. These collaborations extend to dozens of outstanding
American universities. For example, ten universities are involved in
the Terascale Supernova Initiative, which is based at ORNL.
ORNL and
UT researchers together have delivered science of distinction. Several
have received R&D 100 Awards, the Discover Award, the Presidential
Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the Gordon Bell Award,
and the IEEE Sidney Fernbach Award. One Fernbach Award winner also
was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering.
ORNL researchers
have published several papers in Nature and Science based on work using
CCS supercomputers. For example, Ed Uberbacher, researcher with the
Computational Biology Institute at CCS, was one of more than 100 contributors
to the landmark paper on sequencing the human genome published in the
February 15, 2001 issue of Nature. His development of the GRAIL gene-finding
program used on CCS supercomputers was listed in Science magazine’s
time line depicting the history of the Human Genome Project.
A recent
ORNL research effort involving a CCS supercomputer was published in
Science. Marco Buongiorno Nardelli, assistant professor of
physics at North Carolina State University with a joint faculty appointment
at ORNL, created a detailed model of the Schottky barrier. Experimentalists
Rodney McKee of ORNL and Fred Walker of UT tested the model's
predictions. They found that barrier height on semiconductor chips
represents more of an opportunity than a problem, opening the way for
smaller, faster, and smarter computers.
CCS
Partnerships
To serve
DOE, the Laboratory's primary customer, ORNL has built enduring
partnerships on an international and national scale. ORNL has become,
for example, a key resource for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change. Other interagency partnerships include the National Science
Foundation, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, National
Security Agency, National Nuclear Security Administration, and Department
of Homeland Security.
Working
closely with the University of Tennessee, ORNL has developed a variety
of academic and industrial partnerships through the Joint Institute
for Computational Sciences. The institute is the Laboratory's
gateway to computational scientists from academia nationwide
that have partnerships with UT-Battelle, which manages ORNL for DOE.
Academic collaborations also include the Research Alliance for Minorities.
ORNL also
has strong industrial partnerships with supercomputer vendors—Cray
Inc., Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI), and International Business Machines
(IBM). The 6.4 TF Cray X1 (Phoenix) at CCS is the largest of its type
in the world. Add that total to 4.5 TF of the IBM Power4 (Cheetah),
1.5 TF of the SGI Ram, and 1 TF of the IBM Power3 (Eagle), CCS has
a collective computing capability of 13.4 teraflops. The Cray X1 has
passed a milestone acceptance test and is undergoing evaluation on
a suite of scientific computer programs including global climate modeling,
high-temperature superconductivity, astrophysics, and fusion energy.
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![Click image for larger view.](graphics/article02_flashy.jpg)
Computer model of the charge density on an equatorial
plane of a carbon nanotorus.
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Identifying
the Grand Challenges
CCS has
four institutes: biology, climate, materials, and fusion. The institutes
provide an intellectual home and computational infrastructure for community
building. The institutes share several common goals: extended simulations
in areas of science important to DOE; repositories of community codes
optimized for high-end computing; a testbed for evaluations of new
computer hardware and application of innovative software engineering
techniques; interactions with CCS's future technologies group
to push hardware beyond original vendor design specifications to achieve
science missions; workshops to enhance researcher skills and train
the next generation of modelers; increased interactions between research
scientists and computer scientists and mathematicians; and collaborations
to interpret and improve simulation results and to strengthen links
between predictive modeling and experimental research.
Most important,
CCS institute researchers will interact with the community of scientists
in their respective fields to identify the unclassified "grand
challenge" problems that can be solved only by CCS supercomputers.
The institutes are a key to ensuring that CCS has the synergy of skillful
research partnerships and world-class computational technology to meet
the challenges of solving national scientific problems.
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