Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF)
Description
The Leadership Computing Facility (LCF) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (OLCF), in coordination with the LCF at Argonne National Laboratory (ALCF), provides leadership-class supercomputing resources that are orders of magnitude more powerful than the systems typically used for open scientific research. The LCFs enable breakthroughs in science and engineering by providing supercomputing and AI resources to the research community and industry.
The OLCF began operations in 2005 and was charged with developing an unclassified computing resource 100 times more powerful than the systems of the day. Since then, with regular upgrades, the OLCF continues to deliver the world’s most capable computer systems – including the newly launched Frontier, the world’s first exascale computer. On May 30, 2022, the international Top500 list of most powerful systems in the world named Frontier the world’s first exascale supercomputer, reaching more than a billion, billion floating point operations per second (flops) on the High-Performance Linpack benchmark. The computing resources at OLCF, including Frontier, serve computational scientists from all areas of the research community, delivering state-of-the-art computing, data, visualization, analytics resources, and expert staff to solve the world’s most challenging science problems.
Science
LCF computational resources are competitively allocated to scientists from the research community in industry, academia, and national laboratories. Scientists and engineers using the LCFs have achieved numerous wide-ranging research accomplishments and technological innovations. Approximately 500 peer-reviewed research articles based directly upon LCF projects are published annually, including several in high-impact journals.
OLCF’s computational resources support scientific research through advanced simulations across many scientific domains, providing the key computing and data resources that are critical to their success. Simulations performed at OLCF recently enabled: the Exascale Computing Project to meet on exceed their deliverables; NASA to simulate a potential manned Mars lander with realistic physics for meantime timescales; GE to simulate a next generation aircraft engine that is too large to fit in NASAs biggest wind tunnel; DOE climate researchers to win the first ever Gordon Bell prize for climate modeling by besting the long sought threshold of one simulated earth year per compute day by nearly 25%; and researchers to simulate a system of nearly half a trillion atoms — the largest system ever modeled and more than 400 times the size of the closest competition – enough to approach a dynamic model of the minimal cell. OLCF’s users’ accomplishments also include simulating the Earth’s atmosphere at 1-square-kilometer grid-spacing to improve weather forecasting and climate predictions; first-of-their-kind 3D flow simulations of gas turbine jet engines that influence the design process for improved fuel efficiency and more durable jet engines; and bridging classical Molecular Dynamics and AI to produce complex simulations that are both large and accurate—simulating for the first time more than 100 million atoms, with ab initio accuracy, a thousand times faster than ever before – work recognized with the 2023 Gordon Bell prize. The OLCF also works with industry to reduce the need for costly physical prototypes and physical tests to accelerate the development of high-technology products. Finally, OLCF staff shares its expertise with the community, including U.S. companies, to broaden the benefits of high-performance computing for the Nation.
