Hardware
The Molecular Science Computing Facility (MSCF) is located on the PNNL campus in the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, a US Department of Energy national user facility, and it provides a variety of computers and computing resources, including massively parallel computers, SGI, Sun, and Linux workstations, data archive systems and a Graphics and Visualization Laboratory.
A Hewlett-Packard Linux-based computer is contained in the MSCF's High-Performance Computing Center. PNNL's new HP 2310-node Opteron InfiniBand cluster, dubbed Chinook, has more than a petabyte of scratch storage and provides nearly a terabyte per second of aggregate disk I/O performance to enable large computational chemistry calculations. Chinook will support chemistry, biology, and environmental computation and is expected to have a total peak performance of about 163 teraflops.
The Advanced Computing Technology Laboratory (ACTL) is a virtual research laboratory recently formed to investigate and evaluate key technology components and emerging high-end systems for data-intensive computing. The ACTL is also primarily housed within the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, and includes two SGI Altix supercomputers, a Cray XD1, a storage system for bioinformatics research, a testbed with advanced interconnects, and a64-CPU IBM Power-5 server. The technologies available within ACTL are the FPGA; MD-GRAPE (an accelerator board for molecular dynamics calculations); the latest Infiniband, Myrinet and Quadrics networks; and evaporative cooling provided by Isothermal Systems Research, Inc.
Contact: Kevin Regimbal