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Argonne National Laboratory has established the Laboratory Computing Project in order to promote the widespread use of high-performance computing technologies across the laboratory in support of scientific research.

In 2002, Argonne funded a teraflop-class computing cluster purchase as a part of the creation of the Laboratory Computing Resource Center (LCRC). The cluster, called Jazz, is designed to meet the initial needs of Argonne scientists engaged in computational science. With staff support, the LCRC will also lay the foundation for development of additional computational science projects that span the laboratory's programs. A summary description of the LCRC activities and highlights of research done on Jazz can be found in the LCRC annual report.

Laboratory Computing Resource Center Goals

The primary goal of the LCRC is to facilitate mid-range computing in all of the scientific programs of Argonne and the University of Chicago.

A few examples of the many projects anticipated labwide:

  • Chemistry and Mathematics and Computer Science Divisions - developing parallel methods for computing time-dependent cumulative reaction probabilities
  • Physics Division - computing calculations of light nuclei.
  • Energy Systems Division - using CFD to support fuel reformer research
  • RAE Division - conducting integrated neutronic, thermal-hydraulic and thermo-mechanical analyses using high fidelity models are being developed to support advanced reactor designs
  • Reduced Enrichment for Research and Test Reactor program - modeling and developing new low-enriched uranium fuels to convert test reactors around the world to a proliferation-resistant design
  • Materials Science - Massively parallel molecular-dynamics simulating mechanical deformation to reveal novel atomic-level mechanisms

    • Ideally, as LCRC user needs and experience expand, the researchers will gain access to external systems and Grids, such as NERSC, the NSF Centers, and the DOD Centers.

    LCRC Cluster Configuration

    The LCRC cluster is designed to achieve high performance on many different computational codes. It has the following configuration:
  • Compute - 350 nodes, each with a 2.4 GHz Pentium Xeon
  • Memory - 175 nodes with 2 GB of RAM, 175 nodes with 1 GB of RAM
  • Storage - 20 TB of clusterwide disk: 10 TB GFS and 10 TB PVFS
  • Network - Myrinet 2000

    • Availability and Usage

    Jazz is a system designed to support science research as a production quality cluster. It is available to ANL scientists interested in developing their projects to run on large parallel clusters. For information on requesting an account and using the system, please see the links along the left side of this page.


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