Hardware

Computers and advanced visualization systems are becoming increasingly fundamental to the advancement of science and engineering, complementing and in some cases substituting for conventional methods of theory and experiment.

SiCortex -- Serial #1 of the 5.8 TFlop/s SiCortex SC5832 system was deployed at Argonne in 2007. With 5832 MIPS64 cores (6 per node), each of which draws only 600 milliwatts of power, this is a rather unconventional computer, but arguably one that presages the future of high-performance computing architecture.
Fusion -- Fusion is a traditional, PC-based, high performance computing cluster managed by MCS staff for production use by scientists across Argonne. Featuring 320 nodes with a combined total of 2,560 Intel CPU-cores and 12 TB (terabytes or trillion bytes) of memory, all interconnected with a 40 Gigabit per second, high performance Infiniband network, fusion provides researchers with over 25 Teraflops (trillion floating point operations per second) of computing power. Argonne scientists and their collaborators use fusion for their research in a wide range of fields, including Physics, Chemistry, Nuclear Engineering, Nanoscience, Transportation Science, Climate, Energy Science, Applied Mathematics, and more.
kBT -- kBT is a 250-node IBM computing cluster located at the MCS division at Argonne National Laboratory, used by the members of the Roux Lab at the University of Chicago and collaborators in support of research into understanding of the structure and dynamics of biomolecules.
PADS -- PADS is a petabyte (10^{^}15-byte)-scale online storage server capable of sustained multi-gigabyte/s I/O performance, tightly integrated with a 9 teraflop/s computing resource and multi-gigabit/s local and wide area networks. Its hardware and associated software enables the reliable storage of, access to, and analysis of massive datasets by both local users and the national scientific community.
FutureGRID -- FutureGRID is a complement to TeraGrid, geared towards Cloud Computing. It will increase the capability of the TeraGrid to support innovative computer science research requiring access to lower levels of the grid software stack, the networking software stack, and to virtualization and workflow orchestration tools.
Futures Laboratory -- The Argonne Futures Laboratory performs basic and applied research in advanced communications, collaboration, and visualization technologies (e.g., teleimmersion) to enable the development of wide-area collaborative computational science. Our focus is on the development and evaluation of high-end technologies and systems that extend and complement commercially available tools and resources.
Optimization Technology Center -- Designed to enable users to solve optimization problems easily and automatically over the Internet, the OTC includes state-of-the-art optimization solvers (with user guides), a Web browser, a submission tool (a high-speed socket-based interface for Unix workstations), and an interface with automatic differentiation tools. The OTC is a collaborative effort of Argonne and Northwestern University seeking to make potential users in industry, government, and academia aware of how optimization techniques can aid their work.