Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility

The Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) was established at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in 2004 with the mission of standing up a supercomputer 100 times more powerful than the leading systems of the day.

The facility delivered on that promise four years later, in 2008, when its Cray XT Jaguar system ran the first scientific applications to exceed 1,000 trillion calculations a second (1 petaflop). The OLCF continues to expand the limits of computing power, and as of June 2010 Jaguar was the world's most powerful supercomputer, with 224,000-plus processing cores delivering a peak performance of more than 2.3 petaflops.

As a result, the OLCF gives the world's most advanced computational researchers an opportunity to tackle problems that would be unthinkable on other systems. The facility welcomes investigators from universities, government agencies, and industry who are prepared to perform breakthrough research in climate, materials, alternative energy sources and energy storage, chemistry, nuclear physics, astrophysics, quantum mechanics, and the gamut of scientific inquiry. Because it is a unique resource, the OLCF focuses on the most ambitious research projects—projects that provide important new knowledge or enable important new technologies.

Looking to the future, the facility is moving forward with a roadmap that by 2018 will deliver an exascale supercomputer—one able to deliver 1 million trillion calculations each second. Along the way, the OLCF will