Joint Institute for Computational Sciences (JICS)
Research Affiliates
Resource Provider
The University of Tennessee—Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) Joint Institute for Computational Sciences (JICS) leads a partnership to empower and prepare the U.S. academic research community for sustained petascale science and engineering. With the new near-petascale computer, to be housed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the State of Tennessee will have two of the world’s most powerful computers.
System
NICS will establish a major new petascale computing environment—fully integrated with the TeraGrid—with
- Access to a 170-teraflops Cray XT4 system, that will be
- Upgraded to a 10,000+ compute socket Cray XT5 system of nearly 1 petaflops
The XT5 system will deliver in excess of 700 million CPU hours per year and is designed around the Cray Gemini interconnect for improved sustained performance. The Cray Baker system 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.
Roaming accounts at NICS may be requested at any time by current TeraGrid Project PIs. Beginning December 10, 2007 proposals will also be accepted for medium-sized allocations which will begin on April 1, 2008.
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 petaflops in performance.
Contacts
TeraGrid
Phone Toll-free
1.866.907.2383
Philip L. Andrews
Director
National Institute for Computational Sciences
University of Tennessee / Oak Ridge National Laboratory
P.O. Box 2008, MS6173
Oak Ridge, TN 37831-6173
(865) 241-0080
Joint Institute for Computational Sciences
www.jics.utk.edu
www.nccs.gov
