User:NICSKraken

National Institute for Computational Sciences
The National Institute for Computational Sciences (NICS) is funded by the National Science Foundation and managed by the University of Tennessee. The NICS petascale scientific computing environment is housed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), home to the world's most powerful computing complex. The mission of NICS, a TeraGrid member, is to enable the scientific discoveries of researchers nationwide by providing leading-edge computational resources, together with support for their effective use, and leveraging extensive partnership opportunities.

Kraken
NICS has established a major new petascale computing environment fully integrated with the TeraGrid with access to a 608-teraflops Cray XT5 system containing 16512 compute sockets, over 100 trillion bytes (99 terabytes) of memory, and 2.3 petabytes of dedicated disk space. In its final configuration, the XT5 system will deliver in excess of 700 million CPU hours per year. The system is designed specifically for sustained application performance, scalability, and reliability, and will incorporate key elements of the Cray Cascade system to prepare the user community for sustained, high-productivity petascale science and engineering. The NSF computer system is co-located with the National Center for Computational Sciences, home of Jaguar, and other major user facilities at the ORNL campus.

Verne
Verne was retired in 2010. Verne was a 5-node cluster of Dell R505 quad-socket/quad-core Opteron servers dedicated to data analysis and high-end visualization. Each node contained, 16 processor cores, 128 GB of memory, and 4TB of local disk space. The primary purpose of Verne is to enable data analysis and visualization of simulation data generated on Kraken so as to provide a conduit for large scale scientific discovery.

HPSS
The mass storage facility at ORNL currently consists of tape and disk storage components, IBM servers, Linux servers, and High Performance Storage System (HPSS) software. As of January 2009 we have over 4 petabytes stored in over 11.5 million files. Tape storage is provided by robotic tape libraries. The StorageTek SL8500 libraries can each hold up to 10,000 cartridges and together house a total of thirteen 9840 drives (20 gigabyte cartridges, uncompressed), sixteen 9940B drives (200 gigabyte cartridges, uncompressed), thirty-two T10000A drives (500 gigabyte cartridges, uncompressed), and sixteen T10000B drives (1,000 gigabyte cartridges, uncompressed). The 9840 and 9940A drives read and write uncompressed data at 10 megabytes per second; the 9940B reads and writes at 30 megabytes per second. The beneficial feature of the 9840 tape technology is its fast seek time for small file access; these are the performance drives. The T10000 tape technology provides the ability to store a larger amount of data on each tape cartridge for more voluminous data sets; these are the capacity drives.

Research Areas
A few of the research areas explored on Kraken include:

Astrophysics - Understanding the mechanism behind supernova explosions reveals much about the origins of the universe.

Biology - Finding a more efficient way to convert cellulose to ethanol will help make commercially viable ethanol a reality.

Climate - Kraken's unprecedented computing power greatly enhances resolution in the very climate models used by policymakers.

Seismology - Researchers are using Kraken's speed to find out where in California the ground is most susceptible to movement in the case of a future 7.8M earthquake. The data gathered is incorporated into building codes by engineers.

Physics - Physicists are using Kraken's enormous computing power to reveal the nature of matter at its most elusive—from the behavior of molecules to the atoms that make up those molecules to the quarks, electrons, and other fundamental particles that make up the atoms and everything we know.