World-Class Computational Center

The major computing resources are IBM Blue Gene/P systems, Intrepid, Challenger, and Surveyor. Intrepid has a peak speed of 557 Teraflops (TF) built from 40 racks and is dedicated to production science, Challenger has peak performance is 13.9 Teraflops and used to debug and develop, and Surveyor is a nearly 14 TF single-rack system used for tool and application porting, software testing and optimization, and systems software development.

In 2012, an even more powerful system will be available to ALCF users—Mira, a 10-petaFLOPS IBM Blue Gene/Q system. This supercomputer will be 20 times faster than Intrepid, the ALCF's Blue Gene/P, running programs at 10 quadrillion calculations a second. Argonne envisions Mira as a stepping stone to exascale-class computers that will be faster than petascale-class computers by a factor of a thousand. Exascale computing has the potential to address a class of highly complex workloads that currently have been beyond reach, not just due to their sheer size, but because of their inherent uncertainties and unpredictability.

ALCF supports more than 800 active users and over 120 active projects from universities, national laboratories, and industry. The resources are allocated via four different programs: the Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program, the Advanced Scientific Computing Research Leadership Computing Challenge (ALCC), the Early Science Program (ESP), and the Director’s Discretionary Allocation (DD). The INCITE category represents 60% of the time allocated on the machine, and its users are selected by a peer review process led by ALCF and Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s (ORNL) Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF). The ALCC accounts for 30% of the facility's resources and is allocated by DOE’s Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) program, with the remainder of resources allocated to the DD and ESP programs.

Our Leadership Class Computers

Mira
Intrepid
Challenger
Surveyor
Vesta