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 a high-speed network serving thousands of Department of Energy researchers and collaborators worldwide. Managed and operated by the ESnet staff at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, ESnet provides direct connections to more than 30 DOE sites at speeds up to 10 gigabits per second. Connectivity to the global Internet is maintained through "peering" arrangements with more than 100 other Internet service providers. 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):
  Home to Jaguar, a Cray XK6 capable of 3.3 thousand trillion calculations a second—or 3.3 petaflops—the OLCF combines world-class staff with cutting-edge facilities and support systems. The center serves elite scientists from all areas of the research community through programs such as the Department of Energy’s Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program, ensuring it will be a computing powerhouse for the foreseeable future. In 2012, nearly a billion processor hours on Jaguar were awarded to 35 INCITE projects from universities, private industry, and government research laboratories, representing a wide array of scientific inquiry, from combustion to climate to chemistry.

  The OLCF was established in 1992 and became the nation’s Leadership Computing Facility in 2004, charged with developing an unclassified computing resource 100 times more powerful than the systems of the day. The center’s response to this challenge is Jaguar. With 18,688 16-core AMD Opteron processors, 960 NVIDIA accelerators, 600 terabytes of memory, a 10-petabyte file system, and input/output bandwidth of 244 gigabytes per second, Jaguar is the United States' fastest and most powerful supercomputer dedicated to open scientific research.
  

• Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF):
  The ALCF provides the computational science community with a world-class computing capability dedicated to breakthrough science and engineering. It began operation in 2006 to coincide with the award of the 2006 INCITE projects and the research being conducted at the ALCF spans a diverse range of scientific areas - from studying exploding stars to designing more efficient jet engines to exploring the molecular basis of Parkinson’s disease. The ALCF teams provide expertise and assistance to support user's projects to achieve top performance of applications and to maximize benefits from the use of ALCF resources. The resources at the ALCF include an IBM Blue Gene/P system nicknamed Intrepid, and a BG/P system named Surveyor. Intrepid possess a peak speed of 557 Teraflops and a Linpack speed of 450 Teraflops, making it one of the fastest supercomputers in the world. Intrepid’s configuration features 40,960 nodes, each with four processors or cores for a total of 163,840 cores and 80 terabytes of memory. Surveyor has 1,024 quad-core nodes (4,096 processors) and 2 terabytes of memory and is used for tool and application porting, software testing and optimization, and systems software development.

• National Energy Research Scientific Computing (NERSC) Center:
  As a national resource to enable scientific advances to support the missions of the Department of Energy's Office of Science, the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), operated by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, annually serves approximately 3,000 scientists throughout the United States. These researchers work at DOE laboratories, universities, industrial laboratories and other Federal agencies. Computational science conducted at NERSC covers the entire range of scientific disciplines, but is focused on research that supports DOE's missions and scientific goals. Allocations of computer time and archival storage at NERSC are awarded to research groups based on a review of submitted proposals. As proposals are submitted, they are peer reviewed to evaluate the quality of science, the relevance of the proposed research to Office of Science goals and objectives and the readiness of the proposed application to fully utilize the computing resources being requested. A prominent feature of NERSC since its founding in 1974 has been the expertise and the competence of the employees staffing the facility and the high quality services delivered to users. The NERSC staff delivers critical computing resources, applications and information enabling users to optimize the use of their computer time allocation.