Overview

The Leadership Computing Facility Division operates the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility — the ALCF — as part of the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) effort to provide leadership-class computing resources to the scientific community. The mission of the ALCF, established in 2006, is to provide the computational science community with a leading computing capability dedicated to breakthrough science and engineering. The ALCF provides resources that make computationally intensive projects of the largest scale possible. ALCF staff members operate this facility for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science and also provide in-depth expertise and assistance in using ALCF systems and optimizing their applications.

DOE selects major ALCF projects through the Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program. This program seeks computationally intensive research projects of large scale that can make high-impact scientific advances through the use of a large allocation of computer time, resources, and data storage.

ALCF HISTORY

ALCF Timeline

2004

- Formed the Blue Gene Consortium with IBM

2005

- Installed 5-teraflops Blue Gene/L for evaluation

2006

- Began production support of 6 INCITE projects
- Continued code development and evaluation

2007

- Increased to 9 INCITE projects
- Continued development projects
- Held Next Generation Blue Gene workshop (June)
- Installed 100-teraflops Blue Gene/P (Oct.-Nov.)
- Accepted 100-teraflops Blue Gene/P (Dec.)

2008

- Increased to 20 INCITE projects
- Begin support of Early Science and INCITE projects on Blue Gene/P