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In many ways, scientific discovery is the story of taking risks. Since the dawn of the Renaissance 500 years ago, men and women have staked their careers and the reputations of their institutions on the chance that they could reveal what none had before them. Oak Ridge National Laboratory, as perhaps no other place in America, understands the tenuous relationship of risk and discovery. During the Manhattan Project of World War II, our nation bet its very existence on the belief that a hastily assembled group of scientists in the mountains of East Tennessee could unlock the secret of nuclear energy. Working under unimaginable pressure with only the crudest computational tools, their extraordinary accomplishments established the standards that guide us at ORNL today. Six
decades later, we continue to undertake risks in pursuit of discovery.
This report is dedicated to one of those risks, a decision by UT-Battelle
to build a $72 million privately-financed structure on land transferred
from the Department of Energy, to house the Center for Computational
Sciences. The Center is a dramatic statement about ORNL's
vision of scientific discovery.
Teaming with the Department of Energy, our collective vision is in some respects a simple one. We believe that the future of America's great scientific challenges will in many ways be defined by the confluence of various disciplines. We also believe that in each instance, discovery will rest upon the foundation of computational science. To underscore our belief in this vision, the Department of Energy has made a long-term commitment to designing and building the nation's first ultrascale scientific computing facility. When complete, the ultrascale facility will handle 100 trillion calculations per second, a number that approaches the threshold of human comprehension. If our vision holds, within three years we could be witness to achievements in areas such as climate prediction and protein folding that will literally alter the future of humankind. In the Center for Computational Sciences, Oak Ridge National Laboratory is prepared to assist the Department of Energy in this enormous task. We have opened one of the world's foremost computational facilities. Meanwhile, we have quietly gathered the personnel, the infrastructure, and the machines needed to provide the foundation for the ultrascale project. In some respects, our investments and those of the Department of Energy certainly represent a risk. But as our predecessors taught us six decades ago, scientific discovery is the story of taking risks.
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