Researchers from many fields will use the new IBM Blue Gene/P supercomputer at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility. Photo, courtesy of Argonne National Laboratory.

The Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) is part of the U.S. Department of Energy?s (DOE) effort to provide leadership-class computing resources to the scientific community. The mission of the ALCF, established in 2006, is to provide the computational science community with a leading computing capability dedicated to breakthrough science and engineering. The ALCF provides resources that make computationally intensive projects of the largest scale possible. ALCF staff members operate this facility for the U.S. Department of Energy?s Office of Science and also provide in-depth expertise and assistance in using ALCF systems and optimizing their applications. DOE selects major ALCF projects through the Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program. This program seeks computationally intensive research projects of large scale that can make high-impact scientific advances through the use of a large allocation of computer time, resources, and data storage.

This image represents the turbulent flow of coolant into a mock-up of the upper plenum of an advanced recycling nuclear reactor. The colors indicate the speed of the fluid, with red representing regions of high velocity and blue representing regions of low velocity. Read the full story. Photo courtesy of Argonne National Laboratory.

Three visualizations of nuclear combustion in a supernova. The leftmost frame depicts the flame surface itself, while the other frames represent the combustion's velocity and enstrophy, two fluid dynamics that dictate how the combustion flows through the entire system. Read the full story. Photo courtesy of Argonne National Laboratory.

Visualization of an exploding supernova created with the IBM Blue Gene/P at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility. Read the full story. Photo courtesy of Argonne National Laboratory.

Argonne scientists Folker Meyer and Elizabeth Glass analyzing species and metabolic diversity from NEON soil metagenomics samples using MG-RAST (Metagenome Rapid Annotation using Subsystem Technology) on Argonne's Active Mural Display. Photo courtesy of Argonne National Laboratory.