Jaguar rises on TOP500 listing

Cray supercomputer at ORNL moves up three places to No. 10

The supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, dubbed "Jaguar," moved up the latest TOP500 Supercomputers list three spots to No. 10.

The 54-cabinet Cray XT3 supercomputer at ORNL was previously ranked No. 13. The list comes out every six months, in June and November. The most recent list was released Tuesday.

"It moved up the list because it was enhanced," said Jack Dongarra, a distinguished professor at the University of Tennessee and distinguished staff member at ORNL.

The list includes supercomputers throughout the world. The TOP500 project was started in 1993 "to provide a reliable basis for tracking and detecting trends in high-performance computing," according to the TOP500 Web site.

Dongarra said the supercomputer was upgraded by doubling the number of processors in the system. The computer now has a peak performance of 54 teraflops - 54 trillion mathematical calculations per second. Dongarra said that's a theoretical peak performance, or what the computer should top out at.

More cabinets arrived this week as part of an upgrade that will boost the supercomputer's capacity to 100 teraflops by the end of the year.

Had the supercomputer not been upgraded it would have probably slid down the list, Dongarra said. For example, the Earth Simulator, built by NEC, held the No. 1 spot for five lists but recently slipped to No. 14.

"(The Earth Simulator) was introduced to the list in 2002," Dongarra said. "It caused a big stir in the U.S. as it was much faster than anything else in the U.S."

Dongarra is one of four people compiling the list. The others are Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim, Germany, and Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of NERSC/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Darren Dunlap may be reached at 342-6334.

URL: http://www.csm.ornl.gov/PR/PR2006/NS-11-16-06.html
Updated: Wednesday, 13-Dec-2006 09:50:55 EST
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