by Playfuls Staff |
26th August 2006
An upgrade to the Cray XT3
supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory has increased the system’s
computing power to 54 teraflops, or 54 trillion mathematical calculations per
second, making the Cray among the most powerful open scientific systems in the
world. [more]
The computer, dubbed Jaguar, is
the largest in the Department of Energy’s Office of Science and is the major
computing resource for DOE’s Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on
Theory and Experiment, or INCITE, program. The system is available to all
scientific researchers and research organizations, including industry, through
an annual call for proposals. Three of the four companies -- Boeing, DreamWorks
Animation and General Atomics -- awarded INCITE grants for 2006 are doing their
work at ORNL.
"With the expansion of the
leadership computing resources at Oak
Ridge, the Department of Energy is continuing to
deliver state-of-the-art computational platforms for open, high-impact
scientific research," said Michael Strayer, director of DOE's Office of
Advanced Scientific Computing Research. "The expanded system will be
instrumental in addressing some of the most challenging scientific problems in
areas such as climate modeling, materials science, fusion energy and combustion."
The upgrade involved replacing
all 5,212 processors with Cray’s latest dual-core processors, doubling the
memory and adding additional interconnect cables to double the bisection
bandwidth. The Jaguar now features more than 10,400 processing cores and 21
terabytes of memory. The upgraded Cray XT3 has passed ORNL’s acceptance tests.
“The XT3 is a remarkable system
for scientific calculations, and the upgrade of all system components maintains
the balance of the machine while doubling the performance,” said ORNL’s Thomas
Zacharia, associate laboratory director.
ORNL’s Buddy Bland, project
director for the Leadership Computing Facility, noted that the upgrade went
smoothly and on schedule, “continuing Cray’s record of delivering major systems
on time.”
DOE’s Leadership Computing
Facility is on a path to exceed 100 teraflops by the end of this year and to
reach a petaflop, or 1 quadrillion mathematical calculations per second, by
2009.
“This represents a key milestone
in our adaptive supercomputing vision as well as a demonstration of our
partnership with Oak Ridge National Lab aimed at delivering a series of
increasingly powerful productive supercomputers, including a system that
crosses the petaflop barrier,” said Peter Ungaro, Cray chief executive officer
and president. “The powerful combination of Cray supercomputers and the
technical expertise at ORNL is destined to result in significant breakthroughs
in real-world scientific and engineering problems that will ultimately have a
major impact on society.”
