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Supercomputer Wars: Roadrunner Jaguared!
Rahul Srinivas, Nov 12, 2008 1715 hrs ISTCray Inc's XT Jaguar likely to become fastest computer ever
Barely five months after IBM's Roadrunner wrenched the throne from competitors to become the fastest computer ever, supercomputer specialists Cray Inc's XT Jaguar could dethrone Roadrunner from its coveted perch. With the US Department of Energy announcing this week that the latest upgrade to the Jaguar at its Oak Ridge National Laboratory has made the Jaguar achieve a peak performance of 1.64 petaflops, the Petaflops War has truly begun. The Roadrunner clocked at 1.026 petaflops now seems to be trailing behind the XT - albeit by a small margin.
Roadrunner, incidentally, was the first supercomputer to break the petaflop barrier back in June. Cray Inc and others, however, as many industry watchers noted, were hot on the heels of IBM in developing a competitive product.
Raymond Orbach, the DOE's undersecretary for science, in a statement said, "Jaguar is one of science's newest and most formidable tools for advancement in science and engineering. 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."
The XT Jaguar is a scalable machine, and it now has 362 terabytes of memory and a 10-petabyte file system; a total of 284 cabinets hold up to 192 quad core AMD Opteron chips per cabinet. The system has as many as 180,000 processors! Directed at open research, the XT Jaguar will be used by universities, corporations, and other agencies for research projects that require intensive computing.
Roadrunner, incidentally, was the first supercomputer to break the petaflop barrier back in June. Cray Inc and others, however, as many industry watchers noted, were hot on the heels of IBM in developing a competitive product.
Raymond Orbach, the DOE's undersecretary for science, in a statement said, "Jaguar is one of science's newest and most formidable tools for advancement in science and engineering. 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."
The XT Jaguar is a scalable machine, and it now has 362 terabytes of memory and a 10-petabyte file system; a total of 284 cabinets hold up to 192 quad core AMD Opteron chips per cabinet. The system has as many as 180,000 processors! Directed at open research, the XT Jaguar will be used by universities, corporations, and other agencies for research projects that require intensive computing.
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