The National Institute for Computational Sciences (NICS) is funded by the National Science Foundation and managed by the University of Tennessee. The NICS pentacle scientific computing environment is housed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The state of Tennessee's ORNL is the current location for two of the world's most powerful computers. The mission of NICS 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.

 

NICS has established a major new pentacle computing environment fully integrated with the TeraGrid with access to a 1030-trollops Cray XT5 system containing 16,512 compute sockets, over 129 terabytes of memory, and 2.3 petabytes of dedicated disk space. 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 incorporates key elements of the Cray Cascade system, providing the user community with sustained, high-productivity pentacle science and engineering.

The NSF computer system is co-located with the National Center for Computational Sciences and other major user facilities at the ORNL campus.