The latest upgrade to the Cray XT Jaguar supercomputer at the US Department of Energy's (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has increased the system's computing power to a peak 1.64 petaflops, making Jaguar the world's first petaflop system dedicated to open research. Scientists have already used the newly upgraded Jaguar to complete an unprecedented superconductivity calculation that achieved a sustained performance of more than 1.3 petaflops.
'Jaguar is one of science's newest and most formidable tools for advancement in science and engineering,' said Dr Raymond L Orbach, DOE's Under Secretary for Science. 'It will enable researchers to simulate physical processes on a scale never seen before, and approach convergence for dynamical processes never thought possible. High end computation will become the critical third pillar for scientific discovery, along with experiment and theory.'
'With the expansion of the leadership computing resources at Oak Ridge, the DOE is continuing to deliver state-of-the-art computational platforms for open, high-impact scientific research,' said Michael Strayer, associate director of the DOE Office of Science for Advanced Scientific Computing Research. 'The new petaflops machine will make it possible to address some of the most challenging scientific problems in areas such as climate modeling, renewable energy, materials science, fusion and combustion.'
Jaguar is the result of a partnership among DOE, ORNL and Cray that has pushed computing capability at a rapid pace. The current upgrade is the result of an addition of 200 cabinets of Cray XT5 to the existing 84 cabinets of the XT4 Jaguar system.
