Regaining America's Leadership in
High-Performance Computing
 

On May 12, 2004, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham announced a new initiative that promises to reshape the next generation of scientific discovery in America. Addressing an audience at the national Center for Competitiveness, the Secretary vowed that the United States will regain from Japan our historical position as the world's leader in high-performance computing. We will do so by investing in a National Leadership Computing Facility, to be housed at the Department of Energy's Center for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. ORNL and its principal partner national laboratories, Argonne and Pacific Northwest, have been tasked by DOE to build a machine with a sustained capacity of 100 trillion calculations per second. The National Leadership Computing Facility will be a new, open, unclassified national resource that will enable breakthrough discoveries in biology, fusion energy, climate prediction, nanoscience, and other fields that will fundamentally change both science and its impact on society.

In addition to national laboratories, research institutions, and academia, ORNL's partnership to support the Department of Energy's effort includes a significant role by the private sector. Three industry leading vendors—Cray, IBM, and Silicon Graphics—will be engaged as we explore different architectures and experimental approaches on a single infrastructure at ORNL.

Teaming with the Department of Energy, our collective vision is in some respects a simple one.

Thomas Zacharia, Associate Lab Director, Computing and Computational Sciences

We believe that meeting America's great scientific challenges will require the confluence of various disciplines. We also believe that in each instance, discovery will rest upon the foundation of computational science. Within three years we could be witness to achievements in areas such as climate prediction and protein folding that will literally alter the future of humankind.

This issue of the ORNL Review is dedicated to an enormous risk taken by ORNL in the pursuit of that vision. The risk included a decision by UT-Battelle to build a $72 million, privately financed structure to house the Center for Computational Sciences on land transferred from the Department of Energy. The Center is a dramatic statement about ORNL's vision of scientific discovery. Both the vision and the risk were embraced by the state of Tennessee, which provided $10 million for the construction of a second new facility, the Joint Institute for Computational Sciences, to be shared by ORNL and the University of Tennessee on the ORNL campus. Together, these two new facilities represent one of the world's foremost computational programs, with the vision, the personnel, and the infrastructure needed to provide the foundation for the National Leadership Computing Facility.

The following pages provide an overview of the unique resources that the ORNL Center for Computational Sciences will bring to deliver leadership computing for the Department of Energy. We hope the reader will sense our excitement as we anticipate the challenges, opportunities, and discoveries that await us on the horizon.

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