World's fastest supercomputer unleashed

 

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Posted on 19 Nov 2008 at 16:18

Jaguar - the Cray XT high-performance computing system at the US Department of Energy's (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory - can perform1.64 quadrillion calculations per second (petaflops/s).

It incorporates the second and eighth fastest supercomputers in the world, the XT5 and XT4 systems, perform 1.382 petaflops/s and 266 teraflops/s respectively.

Beginning as a 26-teraflop system in 2005, Oak Ridge embarked upon a three-year series of upgrades designed to make its machine the world's most powerful computing system. The Cray XT was upgraded to 119 teraflops in 2006 and 263 teraflops in 2007. In 2008, with approximately 182,000 AMD Opteron processing cores, the new 1.64-petaflop system is now more than 60 times larger than it was originally.

Thomas Zacharia, the laboratory's associate director for Computing and Computational Sciences, says petascale machines like Jaguar help advance critical scientific application areas by enabling researchers to get answers faster and explore complex, dynamic systems.

A 2008 report from the DOE Office of Science, an American investment organisation in physical science programmes at universities and government laboratories, said six of the top ten recent scientific advancements in computational science used Jaguar to provide unprecedented insight into supernovas, combustion, fusion, superconductivity, dark matter and mathematics.

US undersecretary for science Raymond L. Orbach said that the monster computer, which has been made available to wide range of researchers, had helped deliver "spectacular" scientific results contributing to analysis of projects including the human brain, global climate and origins of the universe.

In June, a DOE supercomputer named Roadrunner at Los Alamos National Laboratory was the first to break the petascale barrier.

Jaguar's speed is matched by substantial memory that allows scientists to solve complex problems, sizeable disk space for storing huge amounts of data and unmatched speed to read and write files. High-speed Internet connections enable users from around the world to access the machine, and high-end visualisation helps them make sense of the avalanche of data Jaguar generates.

Jaguar at a glance:

Cray XT
Top500 rank: 2 + 8
1.64-petaflops peak theoretical performance
1.059 + 0.205-petaflops actual performance on HPL benchmark program
182,000 processing cores
AMD quad-core OpteronTM 2.3 gigahertz processors
InfiniBand network
Cray SeaStar network interface and router
362 terabytes of memory
578 terabytes per second of memory bandwidth
284 gigabytes per second of input/output bandwidth
10-gigabyte-per-second connections to ESnet and Internet 2 networks
High-Performance Storage System scales to store increasing amounts of simulation data
Spider, a 10-petabyte Lustre-based shared file system, connects to every system in the ORNL computing complex
Disk subsystem transfers data at greater than 200 gigabytes per second

Author: Robert Jaques