The National Institute for Computational Sciences (NICS) at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville is one of the leading high performance computing centers for excellence in the United States. As functional unit of JICS, the center’s missions is to expand the boundaries of human understanding while ensuring the United States’ continued leadership in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

NICS strives to accomplish its mission by facilitating transformational scientific discoveries. One of our goals is to provide scientists and researchers from around the world with leadership-class high-performance computing resources, facilities, and support.

NICS was established in 2007 with the benefit of a $65M award from NSF. At that time, NICS stood up the Kraken system, the first academic computer to break the petaflop barrier. This enabled researchers in numerous scientific arenas, from climate to materials science to astrophysics, to achieve breakthroughs not yet possible on other resources. Kraken, a Cray XT5 with peak performance of 1.17 petaflops, 112,896 compute cores, 147 TB of compute memory, 3.3 PB of raw parallel file system disk storage space, and 9,408 compute nodes, climbed as high as #3 on the Top 500 List.

That was only the beginning for what NICS was to become. Since that time, NICS has solidified its role as an academic center at the forefront of computational sciences where it has won many awards for its excellence in computing, leadership, and outstanding research.

As a partner in the NSF’s Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) project, NICS is at the forefront of computational science and cyberinfrastucture initiatives. XSEDE supports the most advanced, powerful, and robust collection of integrated digital resources and services in the world. In addition, NICS works closely with the academic community and industry partners to streamline new developments for computing architectures and software technologies.