National Center for Computational Sciences

The National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) is a United States Department of Energy Leadership Computing Facility. The NCCS provides resources for calculation and simulation in fields including astrophysics, materials, and climate research. This research is intended to enhance American competitiveness in industry. The NCCS, founded in 1992 and located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), currently manages a 2.33-petaflop (theoretical peak) Cray XT5 supercomputer named Jaguar for use in open research by academic and corporate researchers. Jaguar was named the world's fastest computer at SC09, a position it held until October 2010. Founded in 1992, the NCCS is a managed activity of the Advanced Scientific Computing Research program of the Department of Energy Office of Science (DOE-SC).

The petaflops Jaguar addresses some of the most challenging scientific problems in areas such as climate modeling, renewable energy, materials science, fusion, and combustion. Annually, 80% of Jaguar's resources are allocated through DOE's Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program, a competitively selected, peer reviewed process open to researchers from universities, industry, government, and non-profit organizations.

Through a close, four-year partnership between ORNL and Cray, Jaguar has delivered state-of-the-art computing capability to scientists and engineers from academia, national laboratories and industry. The XT system has grown in strength through a series of advances since being installed as a 25-teraflop XT3 in 2005. By early 2008 Jaguar was a 263-teraflop Cray XT4 able to solve some of the most challenging problems that could not be solved otherwise. In 2008 Jaguar was expanded with the addition of a 1.4-petaflop Cray XT5. The resulting system has over 224,000 processing cores (as of June 2010) using AMD's Opteron processors connected internally with Cray's Seastar2+ network. The XT4 and XT5 parts of Jaguar are combined into a single system using an InfiniBand network that links each piece to the Spider file system.

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