Jaguar Supercomputer Surpasses 50 Teraflops

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An upgrade to the Cray XT3 supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory has increased the systems 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.

The computer, dubbed Jaguar, is the largest in the Department of Energys Office of Science and is the major computing resource for DOEs 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 Crays 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 ORNLs acceptance tests.

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.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory