Oak Ridge (TN) – Supercomputer centers are scrambling to get their systems operational in time for the June Top 500 list and the National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory is just the latest organization to report a powerful new system based on a new generation of quad-core processors. Expect Jaguar to be listed as a top 5 supercomputer in the next list of the world’s fastest supercomputers.

Even if supercomputers is a topic few of us can relate to, it is one of the truly fascinating technologies of our time – technologies that advance at an incredible pace and tackle the most complex problems in virtually any scientific discipline.

The latest piece of evidence of supercomputing progress is the Jaguar supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Powered on in April of 2006, the system offered a peak performance of 54 TFlops at debut. Last year, the system was upgraded from 5212 to 11,508 dual-core Opteron processors (23,016 cores) with a clock speed of 2.6 GHz, which elevated the performance to 119 TFlops.

Jaguar has gone through the next upgrade and now integrates 7832 quad-core processors (31,328 cores), which increase the peak performance to about 263 TFlops – almost five times what the system had offered just two years ago. The upgrade also delivers 2 GB of memory per core or 62 TB total.

Jaguar would be listed as the world’s second fastest supercomputer in the November 2007 supercomputer list and it looks like it has a good shot at becoming a member of the top 5 club (the 119 TFlop Jaguar is listed at #7).

Learn how to include relevant information!!

May 16, 2008 13:53     

OK, when you report on something like this, it is NOT enough to merely give the specs on the given supercomputer... You need to include a link to the Top 5 list that you keep referring to... and it might be helpful to actually state the supercomputer that ranks #1 and it's specs... otherwise we have nothing to base your report on!!
FrodBonzi report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +0

@FrodBonzi, wrong place for that...

May 17, 2008 08:15     

FrodBonzi, this is a news snipit site, not a full editorial site. You are looking for the wrong information in the wrong place. Suggestion: learn to Google.
Narg report abuse vote down vote up Votes: -1

Whats the...

May 19, 2008 07:36     

Can I have some of what you are smoking Narg? If a techie website is going to give a "news snippet" likw this, whats the harm in doing the job properly & linking to http://www.top500.org/lists/2007/11 In our Web2.0 world, with mashups & media-rich content, I fail to see why a relevant link wasn't added to the article.
News report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +0