The Center for Computational Sciences (CCS) at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory was established in 1992 and in 2004 was designated by the Secretary of Energy as the Leadership Computing Facility (LCF) for the nation, providing a resource 100 times more powerful than current capabilities.

Today, the computing resources of the Leadership Computing Facility are among the fastest in the world and are the fastest unclassified system openly available to researchers. A recent expansion of the Cray XT system at the Oak Ridge LCF doubles the performance of the computer, with 124 cabinets and 11,708 dual-core AMD Opteron processors. The system now has a rating of 119 teraflops of peak performance (119 trillion mathematical calculations per second). The upgraded computer also features 46 terabytes of memory and 750 terabytes of disk storage. The Oak Ridge LCF is on a path to reach 250 teraflops by late 2007 as the dual-core processors will be replaced with AMD quad-core processors. The memory will also be doubled and the operating system will migrate to a version of Linux on the computer nodes.

The Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility is a major computing resource for the Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment, or INCITE (http://www.sc.doe.gov/ascr/INCITE/index.html), program. Earlier this year, the Office of Science awarded 70.7 million hours of processor time to be performed on Oak Ridge LCF. The projects range from efforts to better understand core collapse of supernovae to improving the efficiency of catalytic processes directly involved in the synthesis of 20 percent of all industrial products.