The Argonne Leadership Computing Facility

The Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) is one of two leadership computing facilities supported by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). The ALCF provides the computational science community with a world-class computing capability dedicated to breakthrough science and engineering. It began operation in 2006 with its team providing expertise and assistance to support user projects to achieve top performance of applications and to maximize benefits from the use of ALCF resources.

This year, the majority of the ALCF’s nearly 1 billion compute hours will be used by Department of Energy-selected projects, including explorations into renewable energy, studies of the affects of global climate change, and efforts to unravel the origins of the universe.

Mission and Vision

The ALCF's mission is to accelerate major scientific discoveries and engineering breakthroughs for humanity by designing and providing world-leading computing facilities in partnership with the computational science community.

We strive to be the forefront computational center for extending the frontiers of science by solving key problems for the nation that require innovative approaches and the largest-scale systems.

Accelerating Transitional Discovery 

High-performance computing is becoming increasingly important as more scientists and engineers use modeling and simulation to study complex chemical processes, exotic new materials, advanced energy networks, natural ecosystems and sophisticated energy technologies. One of the world’s fastest computers for open science, Intrepid, Argonne’s IBM Blue Gene/P, is capable of more than 500 trillion calculations per second. By 2012, Argonne will be home to an IBM Blue Gene/Q supercomputer capable of running programs at 10 quadrillion calculations per second. It will be able to do in one second what it would take every man, woman and child in the world to do if they performed a calculation every second for more than two weeks.