National Center for Computational Sciences
The National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS), a division of the Computing and Computational Sciences Directorate at ORNL, provides state-of-the-art computational and data science infrastructure for technical and scientific professionals to accelerate scientific discovery and engineering advances across a broad range of disciplines. As an important part of the broader High-Performance Computing (HPC) infrastructure, the division also hosts the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), a Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility. Each year the OLCF provides over 36 million hours of computer time to scientists and engineers.
The OLCF is home to the HPE Cray EX Frontier, which debuted in May 2022 as the first supercomputer to break the exascale barrier and the fastest computer in the world. With a peak performance of 1.5 EF, Frontier is capable of over 1 quintillion, or 10^18, calculations per second. Researchers from around the world will use Frontier to work on some of the most important scientific challenges of our day, and the power of exascale will open new doors of discovery in climate, medicine, materials, energy, and beyond.
The OLCF is also home to the IBM AC922 Summit supercomputer, which can perform 200 quadrillion calculations per second, or 200 petaflops. Since its debut as No. 1 on the Top500 list in 2018, researchers have used Summit to investigate otherwise inaccessible global problems: from designing new materials, energy sources, and treatments for disease to modeling complex phenomenon related to weather or space to gaining new insights by analyzing gargantuan amounts of data.
