Move over IBM Roadrunner, the Cray XT Jaguar supercomputer just outran you.
The Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has boosted the computing power on its Cray XT Jaguar to a peak 1.64 petaflops. That makes Jaguar the world’s first petaflop system dedicated to open research. Scientists have already used the newly upgraded Jaguar to complete an unprecedented superconductivity calculation that achieved a sustained performance of more than 1.3 petaflops.
“Jaguar is one of science’s newest and most formidable tools for advancement in science and engineering,” said Dr. Raymond L. Orbach, the DOE’s undersecretary for science. “It will enable researchers to simulate physical processes on a scale never seen before, and approach convergence for dynamical processes never thought possible. High-end computation will become the critical third pillar for scientific discovery, along with experiment and theory.”
Jaguar Speed
Oak Ridge said the upgrade marks a major milestone in a four-year project, begun in 2004 when the DOE’s Office of Science launched a sustained effort to upgrade supercomputing capabilities for unclassified research at its complex of national laboratories.
Jaguar is the fruit of a partnership among the DOE, ORNL and Cray that has pushed computing capability to the modern extreme. The current upgrade is the result of an addition of 200 cabinets of Cray’s XT5 to the existing 84 cabinets of the XT4 Jaguar system.
Jaguar uses more than 45,000 of the latest quad-core Opteron processors from AMD and boasts 362 terabytes of memory and a 10-petabyte file system. The machine has 578 terabytes per second of memory bandwidth and input/output bandwidth of 284 gigabytes per second.
The DOE said Jaguar is in high demand by scientists who are honing their codes to take advantage of the machine’s speed. The Jaguar petaflop system is unique in the balance it represents among speed, power and other…