Teragrid Resource Provider
The National Institute for Computational Sciences (NICS) is funded by the National Science Foundation and managed by the University of Tennessee. The NICS petascale scientific computing environment is housed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The state of Tennessee's ORNL is the current location for two of the world's most powerful computers. The mission of NICS is to enable the scientific discoveries of researchers nationwide by providing leading-edge computational resources, together with support for their effective use, and leveraging extensive partnership opportunities.
System
NICS has established a major new petascale computing environment fully integrated with the TeraGrid with access to a 1,030-teraflops Cray XT5 system containing 16,512 compute sockets, over 129 terabytes of memory, and 2.3 petabytes of dedicated disk space. The XT5 system will deliver in excess of 700 million CPU hours per year.
The system is designed specifically for sustained application performance, scalability, and reliability, and incorporates key elements of the Cray Cascade system, providing the user community with sustained, high-productivity petascale science and engineering.
The NSF computer system is 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 delivers a petaflop in performance.
