Oakridge National Laboratory Supercomputer Gets Upgraded

The Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has been using one of the most powerful supercomputers within the Department of Energy to perform complex calculations required for all sorts of science experiments and projects.

ORNL announced today that its Jaguar supercomputer has been upgraded. Jaguar is a Cray XT4 supercomputer and after the upgrades, it now uses more than 31,000 processing cores. All of those processing cores team up to deliver the capability to process 263 trillion calculations per second (263 teraflops).

ORNL director Thom Mason said in a statement, “The Department of Energy’s Leadership Computing Facility is putting unprecedented computing power in the hands of leading scientists to enable the next breakthroughs in science and technology. This upgrade is an essential step along that path, bringing us ever closer to the era of petascale computing [systems capable of thousands of trillions of calculations per second].”

All of the processing power on tap from the Jaguar system is used by scientists in multiple fields. Climate scientists are using the system to calculate the possible consequences of increased greenhouse gases on our environment and how the possible reduction of these gases could benefit the environment. Many other disciplines from fusion research, physics and materials science use the system as well.

With the new upgrade ORNL’s supercomputer will now double its contribution to the Department of Energy’s Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment program.

DailyTech reported on the Cray XT4 first in late 2006. The system was code named Hood and was at the time equipped with AMD dual-core Opteron processors. The ORNL didn’t specify what processors were in use in Jaguar.

Source – http://www.dailytech.com/Oakridge+Na…ticle11807.htm