Oak Ridge upgrades Jaguar supercomputer
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The Energy Department's Oak Ridge National Laboratory has upgraded its Cray XT-based Jaguar supercomputer, putting the machine in the running as the world's fastest supercomputer.
The Energy Department's Oak Ridge National Laboratory has
upgraded its Cray XT-based Jaguar supercomputer. The upgrade will
put the machine in the running as the world's fastest
supercomputer, as measured by twice-annual Top 500 list of most
powerful supercomputers, the next iteration of which will be
announced next week.
The upgraded computer has been run at 1.64 petaflops, or
quadrillion floating-point operations per second. By comparison, in
the last Top 500 count, compiled in June 2008, it
benchmarked a peak rate of 260 teraflops, or one trillion floating
point operations per second.
In that list, the Los Alamos National Lab's IBM-based Roadrunner
ranked at the world's most powerful supercomputer, churning out a
peak of 1.37 petaflops.
'Jaguar is one of science's newest and most
formidable tools for advancement in science and engineering,'
Raymond Orbach, Energy's under secretary for science, said in
a statement. 'It will enable researchers to simulate physical
processes on a scale never seen before, and approach convergence
for dynamical processes never thought possible.'
The system has already run one job that required a sustained
performance of 1.3 petaflops.
Most of the work Jaguar will carry out will be on behalf of the
Energy's Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory
and Experiment (INCITE) program, which grants computer time, on a
peer-reviewed basis, to universities, industry and other government
agencies (A summary of some of the largest jobs completed by Jaguar
and other INCITE computers may be found here).
The first version of Jaguar went live in 2006, and was capable
of 26 teraflops. Through successive upgrades the system scaled to
greater capacities. The most recent version of Jaguar had 84 Cray
XT4 blade cabinets.
This new upgrade adds 200 liquid-cooled XT5 blade cabinets into
the configuration. The current system is made up of over 45,000 2.3
Ghz quad-core Opteron processors from Advanced Micro Devices. It
has 362 terabytes of memory and is supported by a 10 petabyte file
system.
The Oak Ridge lab designed the system to balance computational
power with throughput. The machine provides about 578 terabytes per
second of memory bandwidth and an input/output bandwidth.
Oak Ridge will continue to test the machine through next month,
and put it into production in early 2009.
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