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Originally appeared in Friday, April 6, 2007 Oak Ridger

Oak Ridge ‘Jaguar’ purrs at 119 teraflops


Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s upgraded “Jaguar” supercomputer has passed a 72-hour performance test establishing a new peak processing capability of 119 trillion calculations per second, or 119 teraflops.

“It’s truly the fastest ’open science’ machine in the world,” Thomas Zacharia, the lab’s scientific computing chief, said Wednesday.

The lab combined 68 newly arrived refrigerator-sized cabinets of the Cray XT4 system with 58 cabinets already on hand, then put the reconfigured system through a “very rigorous acceptance test” that concluded early Wednesday, Zacharia said.

The tests included real-life applications, including computer codes associated with advanced simulation of materials at the atomic scale, he said. At most, the tests required only 68 percent of the machine’s peak capability.

“These are the kinds of things you would expect out of a well-balanced, high-performance machine,” Zacharia said. “We’re thrilled.”

The upgraded Jaguar will now be turned over to researchers for projects on climate change, chemistry, astrophysics and fusion energy.

Later this year, Jaguar will be upgraded again. New processors will be loaded into the cabinets that will more than double the peak operating capability to about 250 teraflops.

Within the next two years, the Oak Ridge lab expects to have a new petascale machine from Cray, with a peak capability exceeding 1,000 trillion calculations per second.

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