National Institute for Computational Sciences
TeraGrid Resource Provider
NICS is part of the University of Tennessee-Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) Joint Institute for Computational Sciences (JICS): a partnership to empower and prepare the U.S. academic research community for sustained petascale science and engineering.
System
NICS is establishing a major new petascale computing environment fully integrated with the TeraGrid with
- A 40-teraflops Cray XT3 system, Kraken, that will be
- Upgraded to a 170-teraflops Cray XT4 system, that will then be
- Upgraded to a 10,000+ compute socket Cray system of approximately 1 petaflop.
The third system will deliver in excess of 700 million CPU hours per year and is designed around the proprietary Cray interconnect for improved sustained performance. It will include 10,000 compute sockets, 100 trillion bytes (100 terabytes) of memory, and 2,300 trillion bytes (2.3 petabytes) of disk.
The system is designed specifically for sustained application performance, scalability, and reliability, and will incorporate key elements of the Cray Cascade system to prepare the user community for sustained, high-productivity petascale science and engineering. The Cray XT4 will continue to operate in support of users until the XT5 system is in full production.
The NSF computer system will be co-located with the National Center for Computational Sciences and other major user facilities at the ORNL campus.
Access
As a TeraGrid Resource Provider, allocations on the NICS systems may be requested via the TeraGrid proposal form. Details about the types and sizes of awards are found at Teragrid Allocations and Accounts or by calling TeraGrid (Toll-free at 1.866.907.2383).
NICS anticipates fielding requests for projects that will make effective use of more than 10,000 cores for capability jobs.
Why Apply to NICS?
NICS offers researchers a staged platform where they can begin to port and scale code on a system that will ultimately grow to nearly a petaflop in performance.
