General Information

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Computational Science

With the huge amount of data involved in experiments at Brookhaven National Laboratory, extremely powerful computers are needed to conduct research in many areas of science. Brookhaven has a vast amount of computing power available to help researchers solve data-intensive problems.

Computing Power for Scientific Discovery

The Brookhaven Computational Science Center (CSC) brings together researchers in biology, chemistry, physics and medicine with applied mathematicians and computer scientists to take advantage of the new opportunities for scientific discovery made possible by modern computers. To achieve research goals in these areas, the center has a close alliance with applied mathematicians and computer scientists at Stony Brook University and Columbia University.

At the CSC, computer clusters running the Linux operating system – typically containing 100 to 200 processors – are currently available for performing scientific calculations for Brookhaven researchers and their collaborators.

New York Blue Supercomputer

Supported by a $26-million grant from New York State, Brookhaven Lab and Stony Brook University have acquired an IBM Blue Gene/L and Blue Gene/P.  Together known as New York Blue, the Blue Gene/L  supercomputer has an 18-rack configuration that links together 36,864 processors for a total of 100-teraflops performance, or 100 trillion calculations per second, about 10,000 times as fast as a personal computer.  The Blue Gene/P has 2 racks for a total of close to 28-teraflops peak performance and can run threaded codes.

New York Blue is the centerpiece for the New York Center for Computational Sciences, which fosters research collaborations among research institutions, universities and companies throughout New York State. Brookhaven Lab is  among the academic and industrial users of the facility that perform research in a wide variety of sciences, including biology, medicine, materials science, nanoscience, renewable energy, finance and technology.

Blue Gene/Q

Additionally, Brookhaven Lab has acquired two Blue Gene/Q  research supercomputers: (1) a 1-rack IBM Blue Gene/Q  for general purpose research that boasts 16 cores per compute node, links together 16384 processors, runs threaded code, has total peak performance of 200 teraflop, and placed fifth on the June 2012 Graph 500 benchmark list; and (2) a 2-rack IBM Blue Gene/Q for use by the BNL Riken Research Center.

Further details about the first three machines and instructions on obtaining an account.

CSC Contacts

Robert Harrison, Director, 631.344.8676

Organization Chart (PDF)

CSC News

New York Blue

New York Blue Supercomputer

Research Programs Supported by the CSC

Biological and Environmental Research
(BER)

The DOE Systems Biology Knowledgebase (KBase) is a collaborative effort designed to accelerate our understanding of plants, microbes, and microbial communities. KBase will offer free and open access to data, models and simulations, enabling scientists and researchers to build new knowledge and share their findings.

Computational Science Center of Brookhaven’s role is to support KBase plant and general computational infrastructure needs. Computational Infrastructure  supports include maintaining BNL KBase clusters, BNL cloud computing supports, high speed data transport among four KBase nodes, and developing KBase persistent storage solutions. Plant science supports focused on plant network analysis, including (bi-)clustering algorithms, co-expression network analysis, micro-array expression data analysis, filtering / recommendations of relevant genes from all available network information such as expression profiles, GWAS (Genome Wide Association Study), functional associations, and regulatory networks.

Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR)

The Computer Science Group of CSC conducts research in networking and data mining. In networking the group's research focuses on middleware and algorithms for resource reservation and virtualization in cutting-edge high-performance networks Also, new data transfer protocols at 100 Gbps speeds based on RDMA technology. In data mining the group's interests include solar radiation prediction and forecast in different time scales ranging from a few minutes to one day using a variety of observation data from satellite, weather, and sky images.

Applied Mathematics

Headed by Roman Samulak and James Glimm of Stony Brook University, research in this area focuses on various projects associated with quantum dots, short term weather forecasting, turbulent mixing and quantitative finance. Details

Basic Energy Sciences (BES)
Materials Science

 Research in the computational materials science program is focused on developing and applying advanced theoretical and computational tools to investigate the structural, energetic, vibrational, electronic and spectroscopic properties of nanostructures, surfaces and interfaces for use in advanced materials and energy applications. This program is highly interdisciplinary and explores a variety of research topics and applications in physics, chemistry, materials science and biology, such as green chemistry based on cellulose materials, electronic band structure engineering of semiconductor photoelectrode materials, structural determination and spectroscopic properties of semiconductor quantum dots,  and noble metal nanoparticles for energy and environmental applications.

The Computational Science Center is part of the Environmental, Biological, and Computational Sciences Directorate at Brookhaven National Laboratory.