Introduction to High Performance Computing: It's not Only for Computer Scientists

Dwayne John (National Institute for Computational Science, Uni. of Tennessee)

In recent years, national laboratories, universities, and businesses are looking to supercomputers to help them solve increasingly complex problems. The field of high performance computing (HPC) was mainly dominated by computer scientists, but it is now used as a powerful tool in all the different domains of science. A major facilitator of these supercomputing centers, XSEDE, the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment, is the most powerful and robust collection of integrated advanced digital resources and services in the world. It is a single virtual system that scientists can use to interactively share computing resources, data and expertise. Scientists around the world use these resources and services - supercomputers, collections of data and new tools - at NO COST to them.

The National Institute for Computational Sciences (NICS) at the University of Tennessee has established a major petascale computing environment fully integrated with XSEDE with access to a 1.03-petaflop Cray XT5 system. The system, called Kraken, is located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the world's most powerful computing complex. Kraken contains about 113k processors , 147 terabytes of memory, and 3.3 petabytes of raw disk space.

Examples of scientific research projects benefiting from HPC will be shown, as well as an overview of available resources and explanations on how to gain access to these tools.

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Last modified 16-February-2013 by website owner: NCNR (attn: )