DOE OSTI2013
Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) continues to deliver the most powerful resources in the United States for open science. At 2.33 petaflops peak performance, the Cray XT Jaguar delivered more than 1.4 billion core hours in calendar year (CY) 2012 to researchers around the world for performing computational simulations relevant to national and energy security; advancing the frontiers of knowledge in physical sciences and areas of biological, medical, environmental, and computer sciences; and providing world-class research facilities for the nation’s science enterprise. OLCF users achieved numerous wide-ranging research accomplishments and technological innovations in 2012. It is not possible to fully summarize the breadth and impact of their productivity within this brief report—OLCF researchers published more than 300 research articles in 2012 alone. Here we identify selected accomplishments that advance the state of the art in science and engineering research and development. The work was recognized through peer-review publications in notable journals such as Science, Nature, and The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), among the many noted in this report. Exploration of the nuclear landscape carried out by Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) researchers and their theoretical prediction of isotopes were featured in Nature in 2012 (see Section 3.2.2). On the other end of the physical-scale spectrum, researchers executed a 22,000-year transient Earth System Model simulation that explained the misleading lag of carbon dioxide behind Antarctic temperature records and pointed to carbon dioxide’s role in driving global climate change over glacial cycles. This deglaciation study and related work by OLCF users were featured in Nature and PNAS in 2012 (see Section 3.2.3). Other representative achievements by OLCF users include generation of spectroscopic and photometric data for more accurate distance measurements, necessary for planning future National Science Foundation and Department of Energy (DOE) missions such as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope and the Palomar Transient Factory; calculations to enable the experimental verification of Bose glass; and screening of 2 million compounds against a targeted receptor in a matter of days, as opposed to the months that would be required for computing clusters, creating a vast library of molecular compounds that can be used for future screenings of potential drug candidates. These and other accomplishments are described in Section 3.