level 2

Science Alliance Annual Report

2008–2009

UT-ORNL Joint Institutes

Joint Institute for Computational Sciences

Research to design new materials, investigate protein development in living organisms, or simulate a core-collapse supernova requires heavy-duty computing power—the kind of power available in UT’s $65 million supercomputer in the National Institute for Computational Sciences (NICS), headquartered at the Joint Institute for Computational Sciences. The NSF award included a contribution of $30 million for computer hardware and $35 million for operating expenses over five years.

Named Kraken after the mythical Norse sea monster, the supercomputer ran at full capacity for the first time early in 2009. On the latest Top500 list this June—the globally recognized rankings for supercomputers—Kraken was ranked the fastest university-managed supercomputer in the world and sixth fastest overall. Another upgrade in October 2009 will boost Kraken to become the first academic petaflops system.

But good as it is to claim a high ranking, JICS is more concerned with the science these computers can facilitate. Kraken fulfills one-third of the joint institute’s goals. The remaining two-thirds involve developing programs to take full advantage of petascale and beyond computing power and training researchers to use supercomputing power in their own disciplines.

In FY09, JICS support for Igor Jouline, UT-ORNL joint faculty member in bioinformatics and genomics, resulted in a new software tool, HSP-HMMER, which was 100 times faster than the standard tool used for domain identification of huge and ever increasing protein databases. What previously took two months to run can now be executed in 24 hours.

JICS is directed by Jeff Nichols, ORNL associate laboratory director, computing and computational sciences.