14 DAY TRIAL // Speaking yesterday at the SC09 international supercomputing conference, in Portland, scientists announced that the Cray XT5 high-performance computing system, also known as the Jaguar supercomputer, had officially become the world's fastest computer. The Jaguar moved far ahead of IBM's Roadrunner, which has been struggling to keep its number-one position for a long time. According to the results obtained from the benchmark program High-Performance Linpack (HPL), the Jaguar is currently running at 1.759 petaflop/s (quadrillion floating point operations per second).
The achievement was only made possible by the fact that the computer cluster received a large upgrade this fall, from four-core to six-core processors, under a $19.9-million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The supercomputer is housed and operated by the US Department of Energy's (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory. With the new upgrade, it will be able to provide researchers with the power needed to simulate complex phenomena, such as the evolution of stars and black holes, alongside processes related to materials science and advanced physics.
“The early petascale results indicate that Jaguar will continue to accelerate the Department of Energy's mission of breakthrough science. With increased computational capability, the scientific research community is able to obtain results faster, understand better the complexities involved, and provide critical information to policy-makers,” the ORNL Associate Laboratory Director for Computing and Computational Sciences, Jeff Nichols, says. “The speed and power of petascale computing enables researchers to explore increased complexity in dynamic systems,” James Hack adds. He is the director of the ORNL Leadership Computing Facility (LCF) National Center for Computational Sciences.
“The purpose of these machines is to enable the scientific community to tackle problems of such complexity that they demand a well tuned combination of the best hardware, optimized software, and a community of researchers dedicated to revealing new phenomena through modeling and simulations. Oak Ridge is proud to help the Department of Energy address some of the world's most daunting scientific challenges,” ORNL Director Thom Mason continues.
The new upgrade will allow the ORNL to allocate more than one billion processing hours to the Jaguar for 2010, in spite of the fact that scientists and agencies have requested more than two billion hours. This is proof of the fact that the supercomputer is recognized for its potential and capabilities. Officials at the Laboratory say that materials scientists will be able to simulate superconducting materials and magnetic nanoparticle interactions with increased levels of realism next year, which may lead to the development of new materials and technologies.