Collaborating and Supporting Our Researchers

Partnering with the computational science community is an essential strategy for carrying out the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) mission. Our users tackle complex science and engineering simulations that often benefit from interactions with our staff on a variety of issues. The topics range from detailed information about our leadership computing systems to algorithms that scale well on our systems, data mappings that are efficient for the application and the computer architecture, how to display the results of the simulations, and sometimes even how best to model the phenomena being investigated.

The ALCF staff’s computational science expertise is essential for being effective partners with the scientists and engineers who use our systems. Our partnership activities extend to working with teams who are planning to use leadership-scale computers for the first time, or who are not familiar with the characteristics of our resources and how to use them efficiently.

Producing New Possibilities for Innovation

Propelling innovation in science and engineering is a continuous endeavor. Mira, the 10-petaflops IBM Blue Gene/Q that will be delivered in 2012, presents new opportunities for innovation, given its speed, memory size, and disk storage capacity. Through our Early Science Program we are partnering with 16 projects on enhancing their applications to take advantage of Mira’s features and adding the functionality required to achieve their ambitious science goals.

As we move towards the next major challenge in high-performance computing—exascale levels of computation—no doubt the benefits of partnering will grow in tandem with the size of these extraordinary systems.