National Institute for Computational Sciences University of Tennessee and ORNL partnership

1. National Institute for Computational Sciences University of Tennesseeand ORNL partnership • NICS is the 2nd NSF Track 2center • Building on strengths of UT and ORNL • Systems are now in production • Series of computers culminating in a 1 PF system in 2009

2. NICS Resources • Kraken • 66,000+ core Cray XT5; ~100K cores by end of 2009 • Name inspired by the legendary sea monsters of gargantuan size said to have dwelt off the coasts of Norway and Iceland

3. Guiding Considerations at NICS • Mission: enable scientific discoveries by researchers nationwide by providing leading-edge computational resources, support for their effective use, and leveraging partnership opportunities • Enable a wide range of computational science: small to petascale • Leverage Cray architecture – identify small and large applications that benefit from unique Cray environment • Co-location with ORNL is an advantage for NICS • Leverage: physical environment, operations, power costs, vendor presence, archival storage, software, tools, experienced staff, joint training and outreach, documentation, visualization resources, … • Collaboration with partners – cyberinfrastructure development, operational policies and procedures, training, outreach, documentation, proposal opportunities, … • 20% of NICS resources targeted to outreach – nationally and in the State of Tennessee – academic and industry • Outreach goal: create new computational scientists