PXRF -- Petascale Experimental Research Facility

The goal of the Petascale Experimental Research Facility (PXRF) is to support the development efforts needed to make petaflops-scale computing systems a reality and to ensure that such system are cost effective and well suited to a range of important scientific applications.

The PXRF computing facility will house one of the most powerful computers in the world dedicated to scientific and engineering research and will provide an unprecedented simulation and data analysis capability for a range of scientific disciplines including biosciences, nanosciences, earth science, chemistry, and physics – research areas of intense interest within and outside of the Lab. This facility will also enable a new class of design and analysis capabilities for multidisciplinary engineering problems, including transportation and advanced reactor design.

To cost-effectively construct and efficiently utilize a petascale computing platform will require considerable progress in hardware, algorithms, systems software, and related enabling technologies. One side benefit of the planned technical approach to developing the compact and power-efficient hardware needed to realize the PXRF will be the creation of key enabling technologies that could be used to build cost-effective teraflops-class personal computers. These personal terascale computers could be widely used by Argonne scientists and deployed as part of the initiative to a broad segment of the DOE national user community.