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NERSC 3 Greenbook

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Energy Research User Community

  There are four broad classes of users and projects that utilize the National Energy Research Scientific Computing facility. Grand Challenge projects are characterized by the need to use a significant fraction of the largest computational resources available. Large scale production projects require large computational resources, but do not require to use these resources in dedicated mode. Medium scale projects are those that require computational resources that exceed those available at many local sites but that are modest on the scale of the High Performance Computing Access Center (HPCAC), and they do not require the use of these resources for very long. Small scale projects are those that require no more than a few dedicated high-end workstations for their completion.

The boundary between Grand Challenge projects and large scale production projects is fuzzy at best. Often a relatively small sequence of Grand Challenge computations may be employed to validate a model at the highest achievable accuracy, while a large sequence of production calculations at lower resolution will provide the practical output of the scientific endeavor. Each ER research project may have components that fit into all of the categories, and every ER discipline has projects in each of these classes. It is our goal to utilize these defined classes of users and projects to better determine the aggregate computational resources required by the High Performance Computing Access Center (HPCAC).

NERSC 3 Greenbook

Next: Computing Up: User Requirements for the Energy Research Computational Community Previous: Background and Introduction