The Oak Ridge National Laboratory Leadership Computing Facility (LCF) provides the world's most powerful computing resources for open scientific research.  In November 2008, a massively parallel high-performance computer, a super-computer, at the OLCF nicknamed Jaguar reached a theoretical peak of 1.64 “petaflops,” or quadrillion mathematical calculations per second, about 55,000 times faster then a typical PC.  Jaguar is the world’s first petaflop system dedicated to open research.  The Cray XT system utilizes over 45,000 of the latest quad-core Opteron processors from AMD and features 362 terabytes of memory and a 10-petabyte file system.  The system has 578 terabytes per second of memory bandwidth and an unprecedented input/output (I/O) bandwidth of 284 gigabytes per second to tackle the biggest bottleneck in leading-edge systems—moving data into and out of processors.  The project to upgrade Jaguar, which consists of 84 Cray XT4 cabinets and 200 new Cray XT5 cabinets, was completed six months ahead of schedule.

The Oak Ridge LCF is a major computing resource for the Innovative Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program.  In 2008, ASCR awarded more than 140 million processor hours on Jaguar to 30 INCITE projects from universities, private industry, and government research laboratories.  Such unprecedented levels of computational power are key to cracking fundamental questions that underlie issues of vital importance such as designing fusion reactors that provide clean, virtually unlimited energy; engineering proteins to provide new therapies for diseases and release energy from biomass efficiently; making wise choices to protect our planet and avoid runaway climate change; and designing new materials with specialized properties.  Past projects have ranged from efforts to better understand core collapse of supernovae to improving the efficiency of catalytic processes directly involved in the synthesis of 20 percent of all of all industrial products to materials science to astrophysics, combustion and fusion simulations.