Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF)
Description
The Leadership Computing Facility (LCF) at Argonne National Laboratory (ALCF), in coordination with the LCF at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (OLCF), provides leadership-class supercomputing resources that are orders of magnitude more powerful than the systems typically used for open scientific research. The LCFs enable breakthroughs in science and engineering by providing supercomputing and AI resources to the research community and industry.
The ALCF began operations in 2006. Available to researchers from academia, industry, and government agencies—ALCF supports large-scale computing projects aimed at solving some of the world’s most complex and challenging scientific problems. Through awards of supercomputing time and support services, the ALCF enables researchers to accelerate the pace of discovery and innovation across a broad range of disciplines. The ALCF’s world-class computing resources include the Aurora exascale supercomputer, the Polaris supercomputer, and the ALCF AI Testbed, a growing collection of some world’s most advanced AI systems available for science.
Science
LCF computational resources are competitively allocated to scientists from the research community in industry, academia, and national laboratories. Scientists and engineers using the LCFs have achieved numerous wide-ranging research accomplishments and technological innovations. Approximately 500 peer-reviewed research articles based directly upon LCF projects are published annually, including several in high-impact journals.
Researchers use ALCF computing resources to accelerate scientific discovery across disciplines, advancing our knowledge of the universe at all scales. From detailed atomic-level simulations to massive cosmological studies, ALCF’s leading-edge systems enable researchers to investigate extremely complex physical systems and processes that are too small or large, costly, or dangerous to study in a laboratory. ALCF user accomplishments include employing large language models to accelerate the discovery of new medicines and materials; performing large-scale 3D supernova simulations to elucidate the physics behind the collapse of massive stars; modeling the energy use of the nation’s building stock to identify the most effective energy-saving measures; and several other projects pursuing breakthroughs in diverse scientific areas, including fusion energy, climate modeling, and experimental data analysis. Finally, ALCF staff shares its expertise with the community, including U.S. companies, to broaden the benefits of high-performance computing for the Nation.
