The Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), formerly the National Leadership Computing Facility, is a designated user facility operated by

Oak Ridge National Laboratory Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is a U.S. multiprogram science and technology national laboratory sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and administered, managed, and operated by UT–Battelle as a federally funded research and ...

and the

Department of Energy A Ministry of Energy or Department of Energy is a government department in some countries that typically oversees the production of fuel and electricity; in the United States, however, it manages nuclear weapons development and conducts energy-rel ...

. It contains several

supercomputer A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second ( FLOPS) instead of million instructions ...

s, the largest of which is an HPE OLCF-5 named Frontier, which was ranked 1st on the

TOP500 The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful non-distributed computing, distributed computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year. The first of these ...

list of world's fastest supercomputers as of June 2022. It is located in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

History

Under its former name of the National Leadership Computing Facility, the OLCF was founded in 1992 at

to advance the state of the art in high-performance computing (HPC) by bringing a new generation of parallel computers out of the laboratory and into the hands of the scientists who could most use them. It was called the Center for Computational Sciences, or CCS, and had an

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 seri ...

Paragon computer. Over time, it expanded to contain many supercomputers including the Intel Paragon, an IBM system based on the

POWER3 The POWER3 is a microprocessor, designed and exclusively manufactured by IBM, that implemented the 64-bit version of the PowerPC instruction set architecture (ISA), including all of the optional instructions of the ISA (at the time) such as ...

, an IBM system based on the

POWER4 The POWER4 is a microprocessor developed by International Business Machines (IBM) that implemented the 64-bit PowerPC and PowerPC AS instruction set architectures. Released in 2001, the POWER4 succeeded the POWER3 and RS64 microprocessors, ena ...

SGI SGI may refer to: Companies *Saskatchewan Government Insurance *Scientific Games International, a gambling company *Silicon Graphics, Inc., a former manufacturer of high-performance computing products *Silicon Graphics International, formerly Rac ...

Altix Altix is a line of server computers and supercomputers produced by Silicon Graphics (and successor company Silicon Graphics International), based on Intel processors. It succeeded the MIPS/ IRIX-based Origin 3000 servers. History The line w ...

, and more recently, the

Cray X1E The Cray X1 is a non-uniform memory access, vector processor supercomputer manufactured and sold by Cray Inc. since 2003. The X1 is often described as the unification of the Cray T90, Cray SV1, and Cray T3E architectures into a single machine. ...

Cray XD1 The Cray XD1 was an entry-level supercomputer range, made by Cray Inc. The XD1 uses AMD Opteron 64-bit CPUs, and utilizes the Direct Connect Architecture over HyperTransport to remove the bottleneck at the PCI and contention at the memory. The ...

, Cray XT3,

Cray XT4 The Cray XT4 (codenamed ''Hood'' during development) is an updated version of the Cray XT3 supercomputer. It was released on November 18, 2006. It includes an updated version of the SeaStar interconnect router called SeaStar2, processor sockets ...

Cray XT5 The Cray XT5 is an updated version of the Cray XT4 supercomputer, launched on November 6, 2007. It includes a faster version of the XT4's SeaStar2 interconnect router called SeaStar2+, and can be configured either with XT4 compute blades, which ...

, and Titan. The OLCF is a collaboration of the DOE-SC and a world-class team from national laboratories, research institutions, computing centers, universities, and vendors. It evaluates and deploys technology designed to maximize the performance of scientific applications and engages the scientific and engineering communities for the purpose of advancing science and technology research in the United States. To accomplish this, the OLCF has developed and implemented a three-pronged strategy for building and engaging the research communities to define critical computational needs, work with the manufacturers of HPC resources to express and meet those needs, and develop the tools and algorithms to best take advantage of the HPC resources.

Computers and projects

OLCF's fastest computer, Frontier, is a 1.102

ExaFLOPs In computing, floating point operations per second (FLOPS, flops or flop/s) is a measure of computer performance, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations. For such cases, it is a more accurate mea ...

HPE OLCF-5 supercomputer with a CPU/GPU hybrid architecture. The combination of CPUs and GPUs will allow Titan and future systems to overcome power and space limitations inherent in previous generations of high-performance computers. The facility also contains a

petabyte The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable uni ...

High Performance Storage System High Performance Storage System (HPSS) is a flexible, scalable, policy-based Hierarchical Storage Management product developed by the HPSS Collaboration. It provides scalable hierarchical storage management (HSM), archive, and file system servi ...

(HPSS) that currently stores upwards of 29 petabytes of data. OLCF facilities are accessible through the

Energy Sciences Network The Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) is a high-speed computer network serving United States Department of Energy (DOE) scientists and their collaborators worldwide. It is managed by staff at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. More than ...

or ESnet. Resources of the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility are dedicated to a limited number of high-impact, grand challenge scale projects. Calls for proposals are initiated throughout the year and large, multi-institution proposals are considered. 95% of the OLCF resources are dedicated to these projects. Participants may inquire about joining an existing project by contacting the project's Principal Investigator.

External links

* * {{authority control Supercomputer sites Oak Ridge National Laboratory