A Vision Realized

At approximately 3:00 a.m. on the morning of November 4, 1943, a messenger drove as fast as his car could manage through the muddy streets of Oak Ridge. Sloshing across the front yard, he knocked loudly on the door of the little two-bedroom pre-fabricated house. The short, bald man he roused from bed was Enrico Fermi, working under an assumed name on a project that would literally reshape the world's scientific and political landscape. Across town at the experimental Graphite Reactor, Fermi was leading the top-secret effort to develop the world's first sustained nuclear reaction. The goal was a revolutionary new source of power that, if used wisely, could be of enormous benefit to humankind.

The news Fermi received was worth the intrusion. Located in the complex that later became Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the Graphite Reactor had gone "critical," signaling the birth of the nuclear age. The extraordinary accomplishments by Fermi and his team were the result of an equally extraordinary vision, conceived by the scientific community, then given expression and resources by the United States government.

Almost exactly sixty-five years later, on November 18, 2008, another milestone was reached in Oak Ridge, the result of a similar vision and with, some believe, the ability to transform scientific inquiry as dramatically as its nuclear predecessor. Researchers at ORNL's National Center for Computational Sciences, located less than a half-mile from the historic Graphite Reactor, announced the successful deployment of a "petaflop" supercomputer, fittingly named the Jaguar, that had smashed through the mind-boggling threshold of 1,000 trillion calculations per second. The implications for American scientific leadership were profound. Not only had the world's center for high-performance computing returned to the United States. Of even greater significance was the ability of Jaguar to use modeling and simulation to address scientific challenges that were thought by many to be intractable only a few years earlier.

This issue of the ORNL Review is dedicated to the vision, articulated by the scientific community and championed by the Department of Energy, to build a Leadership-Class Facility dedicated to restoring American leadership in high-performance computing. The vision was daring: to build within four years a machine for open science 25 times more powerful than the world's largest, located at the time in Japan. How the Leadership-Class Computing Facility came to Oak Ridge, and how ORNL staff assembled the resources needed to deliver such an ambitious project with expanded scope on time and on budget—is a story with achievements as worthy as those of their predecessors more than six decades earlier. With technological changes that occur faster than in most other scientific fields, the relevance of petaflop computing is sometimes lost in a culture more fascinated by rankings of the largest machines than by their potential for discovery. As ORNL plans to expand the Laboratory's computational capacity to 2.5 petaflops in 2009, one senses that in time Jaguar's notoriety as the world's most powerful supercomputer will be surpassed by the delivery of transformational solutions to the challenges of sustainable energy, climate change and human health.

As with the discovery that November night in 1943, the solutions made possible by Jaguar in the years ahead will be traced to a shared vision, born among the scientists who articulated its potential, led by the government that believed it possible, and delivered by the men and women at Oak Ridge bold enough to do what had never been done.

The news Fermi received was worth the intrusion. Located in the complex that later became Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the Graphite Reactor had gone "critical," signaling the birth of the nuclear age. The extraordinary accomplishments by Fermi and his team were the result of an equally extraordinary vision, conceived by the scientific community, then given expression and resources by the United States government.

Almost exactly sixty-five years later, on November 18, 2008, another milestone was reached in Oak Ridge, the result of a similar vision and with, some believe, the ability to transform scientific inquiry as dramatically as its nuclear predecessor. Researchers at ORNL's National Center for Computational Sciences, located less than a half-mile from the historic Graphite Reactor, announced the successful deployment of a "petaflop" supercomputer, fittingly named the Jaguar, that had smashed through the mind-boggling threshold of 1,000 trillion calculations per second. The implications for American scientific leadership were profound. Not only had the world's center for high-performance computing returned to the United States. Of even greater significance was the ability of Jaguar to use modeling and simulation to address scientific challenges that were thought by many to be intractable only a few years earlier. This issue of the ORNL Review is dedicated to the vision, articulated by the scientific community and championed by the Department of Energy, to build a Leadership-Class Facility dedicated to restoring American leadership in high-performance computing. The vision was daring: to build within four years a machine for open science 25 times more powerful than the world's largest, located at the time in Japan. How the Leadership-Class Computing Facility came to Oak Ridge, and how ORNL staff assembled the resources needed to deliver such an ambitious project with expanded scope on time and on budget—is a story with achievements as worthy as those of their predecessors more than six decades earlier. With technological changes that occur faster than in most other scientific fields, the relevance of petaflop computing is sometimes lost in a culture more fascinated by rankings of the largest machines than by their potential for discovery. As ORNL plans to expand the Laboratory's computational capacity to 2.5 petaflops in 2009, one senses that in time Jaguar's notoriety as the world's most powerful supercomputer will be surpassed by the delivery of transformational solutions to the challenges of sustainable energy, climate change and human health. As with the discovery that November night in 1943, the solutions made possible by Jaguar in the years ahead will be traced to a shared vision, born among the scientists who articulated its potential, led by the government that believed it possible, and delivered by the men and women at Oak Ridge bold enough to do what had never been done. Editorial by Thomas Zacharia Associate Laboratory Director Oak Ridge National Laboratory

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