The Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program is operated by the Argonne and Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facilities and awards sizeable allocations (typically millions of processor hours per project) on some of the world's most powerful supercomputers to address grand challenges in science and engineering, such as developing new energy solutions and gaining a better understanding of climate change resulting from energy use.
The program promotes cutting-edge research that can only be conducted on state-of-the-art supercomputers. Researchers come from universities and private industry as well as from DOE national laboratories and other government research institutions and include climate scientists, fusion scientists, nuclear physicists, materials scientists, and computational biologists, to name a few.
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The resources at Argonne National Laboratory are an IBM Blue Gene/P system nicknamed Intrepid and Surveyor, a BG/P system. Intrepid possess a peak speed of 557 teraflops and a Linpack speed of 450 teraflops, one of the fastest supercomputers in the world. Intrepid’s configuration features 40,960 nodes, each with four processors or cores for a total of 163,840 cores and 80 terabytes of memory. Surveyor has 1,024 quad-core nodes (4,096 processors) and 2 terabytes of memory and is used for tool and application porting, software testing and optimization, and systems software development.
Oak Ridge National Laboratory boasts Jaguar, the fastest computer in the world for open science and the second fastest in the world overall. With a peak speed of 1.6 petaflops, Jaguar is the world’s first petaflop system dedicated to open research. The Cray XT system utilizes over 45,000 of the latest quad-core Opteron processors from AMD and features 362 terabytes of memory and a 10-petabyte file system. The system has 578 terabytes per second of memory bandwidth and an unprecedented input/output (I/O) bandwidth of 284 gigabytes per second to tackle the biggest bottleneck in leading-edge systems—moving data into and out of processors.
Since 1974, DOE’s Office of Science, the single nation’s largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences, has provided supercomputing resources for unclassified research through the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. During the first two years of the INCITE program, 10 percent of the resources at NERSC were allocated to INCITE awardees. However, demand for supercomputing resources far exceeded available systems and in 2003, the Office of Science identified increasing computing capability by a factor of 100 as the second priority on its Facilities of the Future list. As a result of a peer-reviewed competition, the first Leadership Computing facility was established at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in 2004. A second Leadership Computing facility was established at Argonne National Laboratory in 2006. This expansion of computational resources led to a corresponding expansion of the INCITE program. In 2010, The Leadership Computing Facilities at Argonne and Oak Ridge National Laboratories will provide over one billion processor hours to the INCITE program.
In 2010, The Leadership Computing Facilities at Argonne and Oak Ridge National Laboratories will provide over one billion processor hours to the INCITE program.