The Wisdom of Athena: Extending the scientific impact of the NSF's most cost-effective supercomputer

University Of Tennessee Knoxville, Knoxville TN

Investigators

Abstract

1041710 Kovatch This award will fund Athena, the 166-TF Cray XT4 at University of Tennessee?s National Institute for Computational Sciences (NICS), NSF's third largest and most cost effective supercomputer. At just over one cent per core-hour to operate, it represents an unprecedented opportunity for researchers to perform science. Applications that have difficulty scaling elsewhere have been very successful on Athena due to its superior interconnect. In addition, the ability to co-allocate Athena with Kraken will benefit users of both machines. Long running, relatively small core count jobs (60 hour jobs up to 18,048 cores) can be run on Athena, leaving shorter, bigger core count jobs on the larger Kraken (24 hour jobs up to 99,072 cores), allowing users to benefit from the strengths of each platform. Athena has been enabling science successfully and reliably for the last two years, both in general production mode for the TeraGrid, and also in dedicated mode for climate and high energy physics groups. NICS proposes to continue operating Athena for 12 additional months.