Michael E. Bartell, chief information officer at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) in Washington, D.C., has been named chief information officer (CIO) for the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. (
Arthur Bernard Maccabe will direct the Computer Science and Mathematics (CSM) Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. (National Center for Computational Sciences
The National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) provides access to the world’s most capable computers to a small number of projects. It is one of the world’s premier science facilities—an unparalleled research environment that supports dramatic advances in understanding how the physical world works and using that knowledge to address our most pressing national and international concerns.
The NCCS was founded in 1992 to advance the state of the art in high-performance computing by putting new generations of powerful parallel supercomputers into the hands of the scientists who can use them the most productively. It is a managed activity of the Advanced Scientific Computing Research program of the Department of Energy Office of Science (DOE-SC) and is located at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
NCCS has all the ingredients necessary to enable revolutionary science: an exciting research program led by top scientists, a talented staff, leading-edge technology, fruitful partnerships with other research institutions and industry, and state-of-the-art computing facilities and infrastructure.
The Center is host to the Cray XT4 “Jaguar” supercomputer, one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world for open scientific use. Its peak performance is more than 263 trillion calculations per second (263 teraflops). To support its extraordinary concentration of computing power, the NCCS has put in place high-speed fiber-optic networks to expedite data movement, a scientific visualization center that enables researchers to analyze their simulation results quickly and comprehensively, and a high-performance data archiving and retrieval system.
The NCCS continues to aggressively expand its computing power. Steps are under way to expand the speed of the NCCS resources by installing a petaflops computer, capable of a quadrillion calculations per second, in 2008.
NCCS hosts only those projects capable of producing groundbreaking results. Each year a few research efforts that require enormous computing resources to realize their promise are rewarded allocations of computing time that reach as much as hundreds of millions of processor-hours. Such unprecedented levels of computational power are key to cracking fundamental questions that underlie issues of vital importance such as designing fusion reactors that provide clean, virtually unlimited energy; engineering proteins to provide new therapies for diseases and release energy from biomass efficiently; making wise choices to protect our planet and avoid runaway climate change; and designing new materials with specialized properties.
Great scientific advances will happen because of the work being done at the NCCS, and they will change our world for the better.
The NCCS website is located at www.nccs.gov.
 Office of Science |
Oak Ridge National Laboratory |
 Department of Energy |