Overview
ORNL’s supercomputing program grows from humble beginnings to deliver the most powerful system ever seen. On the way, it helps researchers deliver practical breakthroughs and new scientific knowledge in climate, materials, nuclear science, and a wide range of other disciplines.
The Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) was established at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in 2004 with the mission of standing up a supercomputer 100 times more powerful than the leading systems of the day.
The facility delivered on that promise four years later in 2008, when its Cray XT “Jaguar” system ran the first scientific applications to exceed 1,000 trillion calculations a second (1 petaflop). The OLCF continued to expand the limits of computing power, and in June 2010 Jaguar became the world’s most powerful supercomputer, with 224,000-plus processing cores delivering a peak performance of more than 2.3 petaflops.
The OLCF gives the world’s most advanced computational researchers an opportunity to tackle problems that would be unthinkable on other systems. The facility welcomes investigators from universities, government agencies, and industry who are prepared to perform breakthrough research in climate, materials, alternative energy sources and energy storage, chemistry, nuclear physics, astrophysics, quantum mechanics, and the gamut of scientific inquiry. Because it is a unique resource, the OLCF focuses on the most ambitious research projects—projects that provide important new knowledge or enable important new technologies.
Looking to the future, the facility is moving forward with a roadmap that by 2018 will deliver an exascale supercomputer—one able to deliver 1 million trillion calculations each second. Along the way, the OLCF will stand up systems of 20, 100, and 250 petaflops.
