View source for National Center for Computational Sciences

{{short description|Supercomputer site in the United States}}
The '''National Center for Computational Sciences''' ('''NCCS''') is a [[United States Department of Energy]] (DOE) Leadership Computing Facility that houses the [[Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility]] (OLCF), a DOE Office of Science User Facility charged with helping researchers solve challenging scientific problems of global interest with a combination of leading [[Supercomputer|high-performance computing]] (HPC) resources and international expertise in scientific computing.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.olcf.ornl.gov/about-olcf/overview/|title=Overview|website=Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility|language=en-US|access-date=2020-03-11}}</ref>

The NCCS provides resources for calculation and simulation in fields including astrophysics, materials science, and climate research to users from government, academia, and industry who have many of the largest computing problems in science.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.olcf.ornl.gov/about-olcf/overview/|title=Overview|website=Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility|language=en-US|access-date=2020-03-11}}</ref>

The OLCF’s flagship supercomputer, the [[Summit (supercomputer)|IBM AC922 Summit]], is supported by advanced data management and analysis tools. The center hosted the [[Titan (supercomputer)|Cray XK7 Titan]] system, one of the most powerful scientific tools of its time, from 2012 through its retirement in August 2019. The same year, construction began for [[Frontier (supercomputer)|Frontier]], which is slated to debut as the OLCF’s first [[Exascale computing|exascale]] system in 2021.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.olcf.ornl.gov/frontier/|title=Frontier|website=www.olcf.ornl.gov|access-date=2020-03-11}}</ref>

== History ==
On December 9, 1991, Congress signed the [[High Performance Computing Act of 1991|High-Performance Computing Act]] (HPCA) of 1991, created by Senator [[Al Gore]]. HPCA proposed a national information infrastructure to build communications networks and databases and also called for proposals to build new high-performance computing facilities to serve science.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.olcf.ornl.gov/about-olcf/overview/|title=Overview|website=Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility|language=en-US|access-date=2020-03-11}}</ref>

On May 24, 1992, ORNL was awarded a high-performance computing research center called the Center for Computational Sciences, or CCS, as part of HPCA.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://web.ornl.gov/info/reporter/no88/may07_dw.htm|title=May 2007|website=web.ornl.gov|access-date=2020-03-11}}</ref> ORNL also received a 66-processor, serial #1 Intel Paragon XP/S 5 for code development the same year. The system had a peak performance of 5 [[FLOPS|gigaflops]] (5 billion floating-point operations per second).

[[Oak Ridge National Laboratory]] (ORNL) joined with three other national laboratories and seven universities to submit the Partnership in Computational Science (PICS) proposal to the US Department of Energy as part of the High-Performance Computing and Communications Initiative.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc711796/|title=Partnership in Computational Science|last=Huray|first=Paul G.|date=1999-02-24|website=UNT Digital Library|language=English|access-date=2020-03-11}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web|url=https://web.ornl.gov/info/reporter/no88/may07_dw.htm|title=May 2007|website=web.ornl.gov|access-date=2020-03-11}}</ref>

With the High-End Computing Revitalization Act of 2004, CCS was tasked with carrying out the Leadership Computing Facility (LCF) Project at ORNL with the goal of developing and installing a petaflops-speed supercomputer by the end of 2008.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.congress.gov/bill/108th-congress/house-bill/4516|title=H.R.4516 - 108th Congress (2003-2004): Department of Energy High-End Computing Revitalization Act of 2004|last=Biggert|first=Judy|date=2004-11-30|website=www.congress.gov|access-date=2020-03-11}}</ref> The center officially changed its name from the Center for Computational Sciences to NCCS the same year.

On December 9, 2019, [[Georgia Tourassi]]–who previously served as the director of ORNL's Health Data Sciences Institute and as group leader for ORNL’s Biomedical Sciences, Engineering, and Computing Group–was appointed to director of the NCCS, succeeding James Hack.<ref>{{Cite web|date=2019-12-23|title=Tourassi appointed director of ORNL National Center for Computational Sciences|url=https://www.wyshradio.com/2019/12/tourassi-appointed-director-of-ornl-national-center-for-computational-sciences/|access-date=2020-06-22|website=WYSH AM 1380|language=en-US}}</ref>

== Previous Systems<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://www.nccs.gov/computing-resources/decommissioned-systems/|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120913075246/http://www.nccs.gov/computing-resources/decommissioned-systems/|url-status=dead|archive-date=2012-09-13|title=National Center for Computational Sciences » Decommissioned Systems|date=2012-09-13|access-date=2020-03-11}}</ref>==

=== Intel Paragons ===
The creation of the CCS in 1992 ushered in a series of [[Intel Paragon]] computers, including:

* '''Intel Paragon XP/S 5 (1992):''' The Intel Paragon XP/S 5 provided 128 GP compute nodes arranged in a 16 row by 8 column rectangular mesh consisting of one 8 by 8 group of 16&nbsp;MB nodes and one 8 by 8 group of 32&nbsp;MB nodes. Also available were four 128&nbsp;MB MP compute nodes in a 2 row by 2 column mesh. In addition, there was the128&nbsp;MB MP boot node, four 32&nbsp;MB GP service nodes and six [[Input/output|I/O]] nodes, five of which were connected to 4.8&nbsp;GB [[RAID]] disks and the sixth to a 16&nbsp;GB RAID disk. This provided a total of 40&nbsp;GB of system disk space.<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://www.ccs.ornl.gov/Machines/5.hdwre.html|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/19970121031232/http://www.ccs.ornl.gov/Machines/5.hdwre.html|url-status=dead|archive-date=1997-01-21|title=XP/S 5 Hardware Description|date=1997-01-21|access-date=2020-03-11}}</ref>
* '''Intel Paragon XP/S 35 (1992):''' The Intel Paragon XP/S 35 provided 512 compute processors arranged in a 16 row by 32 column rectangular mesh. In addition, there were five service nodes and 27 I/O nodes each connected to a 4.8&nbsp;GB RAID disk. This provided a total of 130&nbsp;GB of system disk space. Each of the five service nodes and the 512 compute nodes had 32&nbsp;MB of memory.<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://www.tiki-toki.com/timeline/entry/876923/Oak-Ridge-Leadership-Computing-Facility/|title=Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility|website=www.tiki-toki.com|access-date=2020-03-11}}</ref>
* '''Intel Paragon XP/S 150 (1995):''' The fastest computer in the world at the time of its delivery to ORNL,<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://www.tiki-toki.com/timeline/entry/876923/Oak-Ridge-Leadership-Computing-Facility/|title=Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility|website=www.tiki-toki.com|access-date=2020-03-11}}</ref> the Intel Paragon XP/S 150 provided 1,024 nodes arranged in a 16 row by 64 column rectangular mesh. These were MP nodes, which meant there were two compute processors per node. Most of the nodes had 64&nbsp;MB, but 64 of the nodes had 128&nbsp;MB. In addition, there were five service nodes and 127 I/O nodes (119 regular I/O nodes and 4 high-performance SCSI-16 I/O nodes) each connected to a 4.8&nbsp;GB RAID disk. This provided a total of 610&nbsp;GB of system disk space.<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://www.ccs.ornl.gov:80/Machines/150.hdwre.html|title=Hardware Description of Intel Paragon XP/S 150|last=|first=|date=|website=|url-status=live|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/19990428184231/http://www.ccs.ornl.gov/Machines/150.hdwre.html|archive-date=1999-04-28|access-date=}}</ref>

=== Eagle (2000–2005)<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://www.ccs.ornl.gov:80/eagle/Eagle.html|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20060622054057/http://www.ccs.ornl.gov/eagle/Eagle.html|url-status=dead|archive-date=2006-06-22|title=CCS: IBM SP (Eagle)|date=2006-06-22|access-date=2020-03-11}}</ref> ===
'''Eagle''' was a 184-node [[IBM RS/6000]] SP operated by the Computer Science and Mathematics Division of ORNL. It had 176 Winterhawk-II “thin” nodes, each with four 375&nbsp;MHz [[POWER3|Power3]]-II processors and 2&nbsp;GB of memory. Eagle also had eight Winterhawk-II “wide” nodes - each with two 375&nbsp;MHz Power3-II processors and 2&nbsp;GB of memory—for use as filesystem servers and other infrastructure tasks. Eagle’s estimated computational power was greater than 1 teraflop in the compute partition.

=== Falcon (2000)<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://www.ccs.ornl.gov/Falcon.html|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20001210150200/http://www.ccs.ornl.gov/Falcon.html|url-status=dead|archive-date=2000-12-10|title=ORNL CCS Resources|date=2000-12-10|access-date=2020-03-11}}</ref> ===
'''Falcon''' was a 64-node Compaq [[AlphaServer]] SC operated by the CCS and acquired as part of an early-evaluation project. It had four 667&nbsp;MHz Alpha EV67 processors with 2&nbsp;GB of memory per node and 2&nbsp;TB of Fiber Channel disk attached, resulting in an estimated computational power of 342 gigaflops.

=== Cheetah<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://www.ccs.ornl.gov/Cheetah/Cheetah.html|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20050304034952/http://www.ccs.ornl.gov/Cheetah/Cheetah.html|url-status=dead|archive-date=2005-03-04|title=CCS: IBM pSeries Cluster (Cheetah)|date=2005-03-04|access-date=2020-03-11}}</ref> (2001–2008)<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://web.ornl.gov/info/reporter/no99/may08_dw.html|title=December 2007|website=web.ornl.gov|access-date=2020-03-11}}</ref> ===
'''Cheetah''' was a 4.5 TF [[IBM Power Systems|IBM pSeries]] System operated by the CCS. The compute partition of Cheetah included 27 p690 nodes, each with thirty-two 1.3&nbsp;GHz [[POWER4|Power4]] processors. The login and I/O partitions together included 8 p655 nodes, each with four 1.7&nbsp;GHz Power4 processors. All nodes were connected via IBM’s Federation interconnect.

The Power4 memory hierarchy consisted of three levels of cache. The first and second levels were on the Power4 chip (two processors to a chip). Level-1 instruction cache was 128&nbsp;KB (64&nbsp;KB per processor) and the data cache was 64&nbsp;KB (32&nbsp;KB per processor.) The level-2 cache was 1.5&nbsp;MB shared between the two processors. The level 3 cache was 32&nbsp;MB and was off-chip. There were 16 chips per node, or 32 processors.

Most of Cheetah’s compute nodes had 32&nbsp;GB of memory. Five had 64&nbsp;GB of memory and two had 128&nbsp;GB of memory. Some of the nodes in Cheetah had approximately 160&nbsp;GB of local disk space that could be used as temporary scratch space.

In June 2002, Cheetah was ranked the eighth-fastest computer in the world, according to [[TOP500]], the semi-annual list of the world's top supercomputers.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.csm.ornl.gov/PR/OR6-21-02.html|title=The Oak Ridger Online -- Feature: Business -- 'Cheetah' eighth fastest computer 06/21/02|website=www.csm.ornl.gov|access-date=2020-03-11}}</ref>

=== Ram (2003–2007)<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://www.nccs.gov/computing-resources/decommissioned-systems/|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120913075246/http://www.nccs.gov/computing-resources/decommissioned-systems/|url-status=dead|archive-date=2012-09-13|title=National Center for Computational Sciences » Decommissioned Systems|date=2012-09-13|access-date=2020-03-11}}</ref> ===
'''Ram''' was an [[Altix|SGI Altix]] supercomputer provided as a support system for the NCCS.

Ram was installed in 2003 and was used as a pre- and post-processing support system for allocated NCCS projects until 2007.

Ram had 256 [[Itanium#Itanium 2: 2002–2010|Intel Itanium2]] processors running at 1.5&nbsp;GHz, each with 6&nbsp;MB of L3 cache, 256K of L2 cache, and 32K of L1 cache. Ram had 8&nbsp;GB of memory per processor for a total of 2&nbsp;TB of shared memory. By contrast, the first supercomputer at ORNL, the [[Cray X-MP|Cray XMP]] installed in 1985, had one-millionth the memory of the SGI Altix.

=== Phoenix (OLCF-1) (2003–2008)<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://www.nccs.gov/computing-resources/decommissioned-systems/|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120913075246/http://www.nccs.gov/computing-resources/decommissioned-systems/|url-status=dead|archive-date=2012-09-13|title=National Center for Computational Sciences » Decommissioned Systems|date=2012-09-13|access-date=2020-03-11}}</ref> ===
[[Jaguar (supercomputer)|'''Phoenix''']] was a [[Cray X1|Cray X1E]] provided as a primary system in NCCS.

The original X1 was installed in 2003 and went through several upgrades, arriving at its final configuration in 2005. From October 2005 until 2008, it provided almost 17 million processor-hours. The system supported more than 40 large projects in research areas including climate, combustion, high energy physics, fusion, chemistry, computer science, materials science, and astrophysics.

At its final configuration, Phoenix had 1,024 multistreaming vector processors (MSPs). Each MSP had 2&nbsp;MB of cache and a peak computation rate of 18 gigaflops. Four MSPs formed a node with 8&nbsp;GB of shared memory. Memory bandwidth was very high, roughly half the cache bandwidth. The interconnect functioned as an extension of the memory system, offering each node direct access to memory on other nodes at high bandwidth and low latency.

=== Jaguar (OLCF-2) (2005–2012)<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://www.nccs.gov/computing-resources/decommissioned-systems/|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120913075246/http://www.nccs.gov/computing-resources/decommissioned-systems/|url-status=dead|archive-date=2012-09-13|title=National Center for Computational Sciences » Decommissioned Systems|date=2012-09-13|access-date=2020-03-11}}</ref> ===
[[Jaguar (supercomputer)|'''Jaguar''']] began as a 25-teraflop [[Cray XT3]] in 2005. Later, it was upgraded to an [[Cray XT4|XT4]] containing 7,832 compute nodes, each containing a quad-core [[Opteron|AMD Opteron]] 1354 processor running at 2.1&nbsp;GHz, 8&nbsp;GB of DDR2-800 memory (some nodes used DDR2-667 memory), and a SeaStar2 router. The resulting partition contained 31,328 processing cores, more than 62&nbsp;TB of memory, more than 600&nbsp;TB of disk space, and a peak performance of 263 teraflops (263 trillion floating point operations per second).

In 2008, Jaguar was upgraded to a Cray XT5 and became the first system to run a scientific application at a sustained petaflop. By the time of its ultimate transformation into Titan in 2012,<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.olcf.ornl.gov/2012/11/16/jaguar-gone-but-not-forgotten/|title=Jaguar Gone But Not Forgotten|last=Ago|first=• 7 Years|website=Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility|language=en-US|access-date=2020-03-11}}</ref> Jaguar contained nearly 300,000 processing cores and had a theoretical performance peak of 3.3 petaflops. Jaguar had 224,256 x86-based AMD [[Opteron]] [[processor core]]s and operated with a version of [[Linux]] called the [[Cray Linux Environment]].

From November 2009 until November 2010, Jaguar was the world's most powerful computer.

=== Hawk (2006–2008)<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://www.nccs.gov/computing-resources/decommissioned-systems/|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120913075246/http://www.nccs.gov/computing-resources/decommissioned-systems/|url-status=dead|archive-date=2012-09-13|title=National Center for Computational Sciences » Decommissioned Systems|date=2012-09-13|access-date=2020-03-11}}</ref> ===
'''Hawk''' was a 64-node Linux [[Computer cluster|cluster]] dedicated to high-end visualization.

Hawk was installed in 2006 and was used as the Center’s primary visualization cluster until May 2008 when it was replaced by a 512-core system named Lens.<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://www.nccs.gov/computing-resources/lens/|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20091221001825/http://www.nccs.gov/computing-resources/lens/|url-status=dead|archive-date=2009-12-21|title=Lens {{!}} National Center for Computational Sciences|date=2009-12-21|access-date=2020-03-11}}</ref>

Each node contained two single-core Opteron processors and 2&nbsp;GB of memory. The cluster was connected by a Quadrics Elan3 network, providing high-bandwidth and low-latency communication. The cluster was populated with two flavors of NVIDIA graphics cards connected with AGP8x: 5900 and QuadroFX 3000G. Nodes with 3000G cards were directly connected to the EVEREST PowerWall and were reserved for PowerWall use.

=== Ewok (2006–2011)<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://www.nccs.gov/computing-resources/decommissioned-systems/|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120913075246/http://www.nccs.gov/computing-resources/decommissioned-systems/|url-status=dead|archive-date=2012-09-13|title=National Center for Computational Sciences » Decommissioned Systems|date=2012-09-13|access-date=2020-03-11}}</ref> ===
'''Ewok''' was an Intel-based [[InfiniBand]] cluster running Linux. The system was provided as an end-to-end resource for center users. It was used for workflow automation for jobs running from the Jaguar supercomputer and for advanced data analysis. The system contained 81 nodes. Each node contained two 3.4&nbsp;GHz Pentium IV processors, a 3.4&nbsp;GHz Intel Xeon central processing unit (CPU), and 6&nbsp;GB of memory. An additional node contained 4 dual-core AMD processors and 64&nbsp;GB of memory. The system was configured with a 13&nbsp;TB Lustre file system for scratch space.

=== Eugene (2008–2011)<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://www.nccs.gov/computing-resources/decommissioned-systems/|title=Decommissioned Systems|last=|first=|date=|website=|url-status=live|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120913075246/http://www.nccs.gov/computing-resources/decommissioned-systems/|archive-date=2012-09-13|access-date=}}</ref> ===
'''Eugene''' was a 27-teraflop IBM Blue Gene/P System operated by NCCS. It provided approximately 45 million processor-hours yearly for ORNL staff and for the promotion of research collaborations between ORNL and its core university partner members.

The system consisted of 2,048 850&nbsp;Mhz IBM quad-core 450d PowerPC processors and 2&nbsp;GB of memory per each node. Eugene had 64 I/O nodes; each submitted job was required to use at least one I/O node. This means that each job consumed a minimum of 32 nodes per execution.

Eugene was officially decommissioned in October 2011. However, on December 13 of the same year, a portion of Eugene’s hardware was donated to Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) at [[Argonne National Laboratory]].<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.olcf.ornl.gov/2011/12/21/oak-ridge-computing-facility-donates-eugene-system-to-argonne/|title=Oak Ridge Computing Facility Donates Eugene System to Argonne|last=Ago|first=• 8 Years|website=Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility|language=en-US|access-date=2020-03-11}}</ref>

=== Eos (2013–2019) ===
'''Eos''' was a 736-node [[Cray XC30]] cluster with a total of 47.104&nbsp;TB of memory. Its processor was the [[Xeon#E5-16xx/26xx v3 series "Haswell-EP"|Intel Xeon E5-2670]]. It featured 16 I/O service nodes and 2 external login nodes. Its compute nodes were organized in blades. Each blade contained 4 nodes. Every node had 2 sockets with 8 physical cores each. Intel’s HyperThreading (HT) Technology allowed each physical core to work as 2 logical cores so each node could function as if it had 32 cores. In total, the Eos compute partition contained 11,776 traditional processor cores (23,552 logical cores with HT Technology enabled).<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.olcf.ornl.gov/olcf-resources/compute-systems/eos/|title=Eos|website=Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility|language=en-US|access-date=2020-03-11}}</ref>

Eos provided a space for tool and application porting, small scale jobs to prepare capability runs on Titan, as well as software generation, verification, and optimization.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.olcf.ornl.gov/olcf-resources/compute-systems/eos/|title=Eos|website=Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility|language=en-US|access-date=2020-03-11}}</ref>

=== Titan (OLCF-3) (2012–2019) ===
[[Titan (supercomputer)|'''Titan''']] was a hybrid-architecture Cray XK7 system with a theoretical peak performance exceeding 27,000 trillion calculations per second (27 petaflops). It contained both advanced 16-core AMD Opteron CPUs and NVIDIA Kepler graphics processing units (GPUs). This combination allowed Titan to achieve 10 times the speed and 5 times the energy efficiency of its predecessor, the Jaguar supercomputer, while using only modestly more energy and occupying the same physical footprint.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.olcf.ornl.gov/olcf-resources/compute-systems/titan/|title=Titan|website=Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility|language=en-US|access-date=2020-03-11}}</ref>

Titan featured 18,688 compute nodes, a total system memory of 710&nbsp;TB, and Cray’s high-performance Gemini network. Its 299,008 CPU cores guided simulations and the accompanying GPUs handled hundreds of calculations simultaneously. The system provided decreased time to solution, increased complexity of models, and greater realism in simulations.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.olcf.ornl.gov/olcf-resources/compute-systems/titan/|title=Titan|website=Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility|language=en-US|access-date=2020-03-11}}</ref> In November 2012, Titan received the Number 1 position on the TOP500 supercomputer list.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.top500.org/featured/systems/titan-oak-ridge-national-laboratory/|title=Titan: Oak Ridge National Laboratory {{!}} TOP500 Supercomputer Sites|website=www.top500.org|access-date=2020-03-11}}</ref>

After 7 years of service, Titan was decommissioned in August 2019 to make room for the Frontier supercomputer.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.olcf.ornl.gov/2019/06/28/farewell-titan/|title=Farewell, Titan|website=Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility|language=en-US|access-date=2020-03-11}}</ref>

== Current Systems ==

=== Spider ===
The OLCF’s center-wide [[Lustre (file system)|Lustre file system]], called '''Spider''', is the operational work file system for most OLCF computational resources. As an extremely high-performance system, Spider has over 20,000 clients, providing 32 PB of disk space, and it can move data at more than 1&nbsp;TB/s. Spider comprises two filesystems, Atlas1 and Atlas2, in order to provide high availability and load balance across multiple metadata servers for increased performance.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.olcf.ornl.gov/olcf-resources/data-visualization-resources/spider/|title=Spider|website=Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility|language=en-US|access-date=2020-03-11}}</ref>

=== HPSS ===
'''HPSS''', ORNL’s archival mass-storage resource, consists of tape and disk storage components, Linux servers, and [[High Performance Storage System]] (HPSS) software. Tape storage is provided by [[Storage Technology Corporation|StorageTek]] SL8500 robotic tape libraries, each of which can hold up to 10,000 cartridges.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.olcf.ornl.gov/olcf-resources/data-visualization-resources/hpss/|title=HPSS|website=Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility|language=en-US|access-date=2020-03-11}}</ref> Each library has 24 [[StorageTek tape formats|T10K-A drives]], 60 T10K-B drives, 36 T10K-C drives, and 72 T10K-D drives.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.olcf.ornl.gov/olcf-resources/data-visualization-resources/hpss/|title=HPSS|website=Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility|language=en-US|access-date=2020-03-11}}</ref>

=== EVEREST ===
'''EVEREST''' (Exploratory Visualization Environment for Research in Science and Technology) is a large-scale venue for data exploration and analysis. EVEREST measures 30 feet long by 8 feet tall, and its main feature is a 27-projector PowerWall with an aggregate pixel count of 35 million pixels. The projectors are arranged in a 9×3 array, each providing 3,500 lumens for a very bright display.

Displaying 11,520 by 3,072 pixels, the wall offers a tremendous amount of visual detail. The wall is integrated with the rest of the computing center, creating a high-bandwidth data path between large-scale high-performance computing and large-scale data visualization.

EVEREST is controlled by a 14-node cluster. Each node contains four dual-core AMD Opteron processors. These 14 nodes have [[Nvidia Quadro|NVIDIA QuadroFX]] 3000G graphics cards connected to the projectors, providing a very-high-throughput visualization capability. The visualization lab acts as an experimental facility for development of future [[Visualization (graphics)|visualization]] capabilities. It houses a 12-panel tiled LCD display, test cluster nodes, interaction devices, and video equipment.

=== Rhea ===
'''Rhea''' is a 521-node, commodity-type Linux cluster. Rhea provides a conduit for large-scale scientific discovery via pre- and post-processing of simulation data generated on the Titan supercomputer. Each of Rhea’s first 512 nodes contain two 8-core 2.0&nbsp;GHz Intel Xeon processors with Intel’s HT Technology and 128&nbsp;GB of main memory. Rhea also has nine large memory GPU nodes. These nodes each have 1&nbsp;TB of main memory and two NVIDIA K80 GPUs with two 14-core 2.30&nbsp;GHz Intel Xeon processors with HT Technology. Rhea is connected to the OLCF’s high performance Lustre filesystem, Atlas.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.olcf.ornl.gov/olcf-resources/compute-systems/rhea/|title=Rhea|website=Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility|language=en-US|access-date=2020-03-11}}</ref>

=== Wombat ===
'''Wombat''' is a single-rack cluster from [[Hewlett Packard Enterprise|HPE]] based on the 64-bit ARM architecture instead of traditional x86-based architecture. This system is available to support computer science research projects aimed at exploring the ARM architecture.

The Wombat cluster has 16 compute nodes, four of which have two AMD GPU accelerators attached (eight GPUs total in the system). Each compute node has two 28-core Cavium ThunderX2 processors, 256&nbsp;GB RAM (16 DDR4 DIMMs) and a 480&nbsp;GB SSD for node-local storage. Nodes are connected with EDR InfiniBand (~100&nbsp;Gbit/s).<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.olcf.ornl.gov/olcf-resources/compute-systems/wombat/|title=Wombat|website=Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility|language=en-US|access-date=2020-03-11}}</ref>

=== Summit (OLCF-4) ===
[[File:Summit (supercomputer).jpg|alt=The OLCF's IBM AC922 Summit supercomputer.|thumb|304x304px|The OLCF's IBM AC922 Summit supercomputer.]]
The '''IBM AC922 [[Summit (supercomputer)|Summit]]''', or '''OLCF-4''', is ORNL’s 200-petaflop flagship supercomputer. Summit was originally launched in June 2018, and as of the November 2019 TOP500 list, is the fastest computer in the world with a [[LINPACK benchmarks|High Performance Linpack]] (HPL) performance of 148.6 petaflops.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.top500.org/lists/2019/11/|title=November 2019 {{!}} TOP500 Supercomputer Sites|website=www.top500.org|access-date=2020-03-11}}</ref> Summit is also the first computer to reach [[Exascale computing|exascale]] performance, achieving a peak throughput of 1.88 exaops through a mixture of [[Single-precision floating-point format|single]]- and [[Half-precision floating-point format|half-precision floating point operations]].<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.olcf.ornl.gov/2018/06/08/genomics-code-exceeds-exaops-on-summit-supercomputer/|title=Genomics Code Exceeds Exaops on Summit Supercomputer|website=Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility|language=en-US|access-date=2020-03-11}}</ref>

Like its predecessor Titan, Summit makes use of a hybrid architecture that integrates its 9,216 [[POWER9|Power9]] CPUs and 27,648 [[Volta (microarchitecture)|NVIDIA Volta]] V100 GPUs using NVIDIA’s NVLink.<ref>{{Cite report |url=http://www.teratec.eu/actu/calcul/Nvidia_Coral_White_Paper_Final_3_1.pdf |title=Summit and Sierra Supercomputers: An Inside Look at the U.S. Department of Energy’s New Pre-Exascale Systems |website=Teratec }}</ref> Summit features 4,608 nodes (nearly a quarter of Titan’s 18,688 nodes), each with 512&nbsp;GB of [[DDR4 SDRAM|Double Data Rate 4 Synchronous Dynamic Random-Access Memory]] (DDR4) and 96&nbsp;GB of [[High Bandwidth Memory#HBM 2|High Bandwidth Memory]] (HBM2) per node, with a total storage capacity of 250 petabytes.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.olcf.ornl.gov/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Summit_bythenumbers_FIN-1.pdf|title=Summit: By the Numbers|last=|first=|date=|website=|access-date=}}</ref>

=== Frontier (OLCF-5) ===
Originally scheduled for delivery in 2021 with user access becoming available the following year, [[Frontier (supercomputer)|'''Frontier''']] is ORNL’s first sustainable exascale system, meaning it is capable of performing one quintillion—one billion billion—operations per second. The system is composed of more than 100 Cray Shasta cabinets with an anticipated peak performance around 1.5 exaflops.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.olcf.ornl.gov/frontier/|title=Frontier|website=www.olcf.ornl.gov|access-date=2020-03-11}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web |title=Frontier supercomputer debuts as world’s fastest, breaking exascale barrier {{!}} ORNL |url=https://www.ornl.gov/news/frontier-supercomputer-debuts-worlds-fastest-breaking-exascale-barrier |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20240404065202/https://www.olcf.ornl.gov/frontier/ |archive-date=2024-04-04 |access-date=2024-04-27 |website=www.ornl.gov}}</ref>

== Research areas ==

* '''Biology''' – With OLCF supercomputing resources, researchers can use knowledge of the molecular scale to develop new drugs and medical therapies, study complex biological systems, and model gene regulation.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.olcf.ornl.gov/leadership-science/biology/|title=Biology|website=Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility|language=en-US|access-date=2020-03-11}}</ref>
* '''Chemistry''' – Supercomputers like Summit can explore the intricacies of matter at the atomic level, allowing for first principles discoveries and detailed molecular models.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.olcf.ornl.gov/leadership-science/chemistry/|title=Chemistry|website=Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility|language=en-US|access-date=2020-03-11}}</ref>
* '''Computer Science''' – Researchers are developing the tools necessary to evaluate a range of supercomputing systems, with the goals of discovering how best to use each, how to find the best fit for any given application, and how to tailor applications to get the best performance.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.olcf.ornl.gov/leadership-science/computer-science/|title=Computer Science|website=Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility|language=en-US|access-date=2020-03-11}}</ref>
* '''Earth Science''' – High performance computing allows for large scale computation of complex environmental and geographical systems, and NCCS researchers use this information to better understand the changes in Earth's climate brought on by global warming.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.olcf.ornl.gov/leadership-science/earth-science/|title=Earth Science|website=Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility|language=en-US|access-date=2020-03-11}}</ref>
* '''Engineering''' – OLCF resources like Summit are being used for engineering applications such as simulations of gas turbines and combustion engines.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.olcf.ornl.gov/leadership-science/engineering/|title=Engineering|website=Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility|language=en-US|access-date=2020-03-11}}</ref>
* '''Fusion''' – Understanding the behavior of fusion plasmas and simulating various device aspects gives researchers insight into the construction of [[ITER]], a prototype fusion power plant.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.olcf.ornl.gov/2020/01/02/speeding-toward-the-future-of-fusion/|title=Speeding Toward the Future of Fusion|website=Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility|language=en-US|access-date=2020-03-11}}</ref>
* '''Materials Science''' – Research into [[materials science]] at ORNL has aimed at improving various areas of modern life, from power generation and transmission to transportation to the production of faster, smaller, more versatile computers and storage devices.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.olcf.ornl.gov/leadership-science/materials/|title=Materials Science|website=Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility|language=en-US|access-date=2020-03-11}}</ref>
* '''Nuclear Energy''' – The development of new nuclear reactors that employ advanced fuel cycles and adhere to modern safety and nonproliferation constraints requires complex modelling and simulations.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.olcf.ornl.gov/leadership-science/nuclear-energy/|title=Nuclear Energy|website=Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility|language=en-US|access-date=2020-03-11}}</ref> Often, the complexity of these simulations necessitates the use of supercomputers that can ensure accuracy of models.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.olcf.ornl.gov/web-project/predictive-chemistry-of-realistic-systems-for-advanced-nuclear-energy/|title=Predictive chemistry of realistic systems for advanced nuclear energy|website=Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility|language=en-US|access-date=2020-03-11}}</ref>
* '''Physics''' – Physicists use NCCS’s high performance computing power to reveal the fundamental nature of matter, including the behavior of quarks, electrons, and other fundamental particles that make up atoms.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.olcf.ornl.gov/leadership-science/physics/|title=Physics|website=Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility|language=en-US|access-date=2020-03-11}}</ref>

== References ==
<references/>

== External links ==
*{{Commons category inline|Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility}}
*[https://www.olcf.ornl.gov/ The Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility site]
*[http://www.ornl.gov The website for Oak Ridge National Laboratory]

{{authority control}}

[[Category:United States Department of Energy]]
[[Category:Oak Ridge National Laboratory]]
[[Category:Supercomputer sites]]
[[Category:Government agencies established in 1992]]
[[Category:1992 establishments in Tennessee]]