April 10, 2008

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded $65 million to the Univ. of Tennessee to build and operate one of the world's most powerful supercomputers and lead a nationwide partnership to put it to use. Called Kraken, the supercomputer will enhance the computational power of the TeraGrid, the world's largest, most powerful and comprehensive distributed cyberinfrastructure for open scientific research.

The award is the largest research grant ever received by the Univ. of Tennessee. The partnership proposed in seeking the award and to be led by UT is called the National Institute for Computational Sciences (NICS), and will facilitate the use of the new supercomputer.

The project team is led by Thomas Zacharia, UT vice president for science and technology and ORNL associate lab director for computing and computational sciences.

The new supercomputer system will be built and deployed in partnership with Cray and AMD, and it will be capable of nearly 1,000 trillion calculations a second (1 petaflops) and will give researchers the tools they need to conduct transformational research in a variety of fields.

Some examples of how the new system is expected to be put to use:

• Astrophysicists will move toward realistic simulations of supernova formation, galaxy evolution, and black hole mergers.
• Climate scientists will get a boost in their efforts to predict extreme weather such as hurricanes and tornadoes as well as long-term climate change and the effects of pollution.
• Earth scientists will be able to perform high-resolution simulations of the earth's interior and enhance our understanding of the planet's evolution.
• Materials scientists will be better able to design materials with useful properties.

The system will also enable researchers to develop new knowledge and solutions in areas such as chemistry, biochemistry, particle physics, engineering, and computer science.

"Researchers need increasingly powerful computing resources if they are to deliver the breakthroughs that society demands in climate science, energy research, and other fields," Zacharia says. "This award will guarantee that we are able to deliver those resources."

The grant is being issued by the NSF's Office of Cyber Infrastructure. It includes $30 million for computer hardware as well as $35 million toward operation of the system over the course of the next 5 years.

"This is a significant achievement for the Univ. of Tennessee and we applaud the NSF's commitment to achieving breakthrough science through world-class high performance computing technologies," says Peter Ungaro, president and CEO of Cray.

"The Cray XT system will be upgraded over the life of this contract to become one of the largest supercomputers in the world and will allow researchers to tackle the most complex computational problems in existence. With key attributes of exceptional programmability, portability and robustness—and the capability of scaling to unprecedented levels of sustained performance on real applications—this system will enable researchers to work toward achieving the top industry advancements and scientific breakthroughs of our day."

NICS will be housed in the UT-ORNL Joint Institute for Computational Sciences, the first state-owned building ever built on a national laboratory campus.

The UT-ORNL partnership is home to four new joint institutes, including JICS. Other UT-ORNL joint institutes include the Joint Institute for Advanced Materials, a $45 million facility to be built on UT's campus; the Joint Institute for Biological Sciences, an $11.8 million facility on the ORNL campus that will be home to the U.S. Dept. of Energy's new Bioenergy Science Center, a $125 million research endeavor between ORNL, UT and other partners; and the Joint Institute for Neutron Sciences will be built adjacent to the Spallation Neutron Source at ORNL.

Led by UT, the NICS partnership includes academia (Clemson, Duke, Florida State, Louisiana State, North Carolina State, Rice, and Vanderbilt universities; the universities of Houston, Oklahoma, and Virginia; and Virginia Tech), current NSF resource providers (the National Center for Atmospheric Research, ORNL, and Texas Advanced Computing Center), a university consortium (Oak Ridge Associated Universities), and industrial partners (Cray and AMD).

TeraGrid homepage: http://www.teragrid.org/index.php

National Institute for Computational Sciences: http://www.jics.utk.edu/

SOURCE: Univ. of Tennessee