HPCwire: ORNL's 'Jaguar' Leaps Past Petaflop

The Leading Source for Global News and Information Covering the Ecosystem of High Productivity Computing

HPCwire >> Blogs

Blog: From the Editor

November 11, 2008

ORNL's 'Jaguar' Leaps Past Petaflop

Yesterday, the DOE announced that the Cray XT 'Jaguar' supercomputer at Oak Ridge has been upgraded to 1.64 peak petaflops. That's quite a jump from the 260 peak teraflops* mark it achieved this past summer, and a 60-fold increase from Jaguar's original 26 teraflops in 2006.

The Jaguar upgrade was achieved by tacking on 200 Cray XT5 cabinets onto the existing 84 XT4 cabinets. The new gear uses the latest 2.3GHz quad-core Opterons and Cray's new ECOflex liquid cooling system. To keep the compute nodes fed with data, the system will have a whopping 362 terabytes of memory and a 10-petabyte file system.

Unlike the classified work destined for the Roadrunner system at Los Alamos National Laboratory, the world's first petaflop supercomputer, Jaguar is intended for open science use by the DOE and the broader scientific community. Under the department's Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program, outside researchers and even commercial users are going to get access to their first petaflop super in 2009.

Scientists have already used the upgraded Jaguar to run a superconductivity calculation that achieved a sustained performance of more than 1.3 petaflops. The system will continue to be used for big science in areas such as climate modeling, astrophysics and fusion energy, but now with 5 times the performance.

The petaflop achievement for ORNL is a bit ahead of schedule, perhaps spurred on by the IBM Roadrunner deployment at Los Alamos just a few months ago. The IBM super achieved 1.375 petaflops back in June, breaking the petaflop barrier and grabbing the number one position on the TOP500 list. Jaguar is now in line to capture the top spot on the next list, which will be announced on November 18. With a peak rating of 1.64 petaflops, Jaguar's new Linpack performance should settle in at around 1.3 petaflops, beating June's Roadrunner by 300 teraflops.

Of course, dust rarely settles on the IBM supers. An upgrade to Roadrunner, or even a surprise Blue Gene/P makeover at Argonne or somewhere else, is always possible. We'll know in a week.

Energy consumption at ORNL is going set some records too. Depending upon how efficient that new Cray liquid cooling system is, power use under compute-intensive workloads is liable to be anywhere from 5 to 10 megawatts -- enough to power a small town. One of the advantages of the Cell-based Roadrunner supercomputer is its rather high energy efficiency. For a petaflop of Linpack performance, Roadrunner draws a mere (!) 2.3 megawatts.

The new petaflop machine means more than just prestige to Cray. If ORNL signs off on the upgraded system before the end of the year, Cray will post a profit in 2008, otherwise not. System acceptance would be quite a Christmas present for the supercomputer maker. The last time Cray recorded a profitable year was 2003.

*corrected typo per reader comment.

Posted by Michael Feldman - November 11 @ 11:26AM

(Digg, Technorati, more)

Discussion

There are 3 discussion items posted.

Here's to Cray accuracy over HPCwire's.
Submitted by taylors on 11/13/2008 - 8:46PM

<< That's quite a jump from the 260 peak petaflops mark it achieved this past summer >>

260 peak petaflops? This type-o certainly confuses the issue.

Hint: It's teraflops.

Post #1

Sun Microsystems
Submitted by IsaacU on 03/24/2009 - 2:55AM

The Jaguar upgrade was achieved by tacking on 200 Cray XT5 cabinets onto the existing 84 XT4 cabinets. The new gear uses the latest 2.3GHz quad-core Opterons and Cray's new ECOflex liquid cooling system. To keep the compute nodes fed with data, the system will have a whopping 362 terabytes of memory and a 10-petabyte file system. With this features its good. But did you heard the issue on Sun Microsystem? Sun Microsystems is both information technology and software company, and been recognized since the 80s. They had become one of the biggest competitors with Microsoft for IT and corporate software and hardware. However, after the dot com bust in the early 2000s, Sun Microsystems has begun to struggle a bit. Instant payday loans aren't really going to help them, but they have entered negotiations with IBM for a buyout that's supposed to total around $6.5 billion. News of the talks has boosted Suns' stock on the market. It may be the best move for them to avoid staring down bankruptcy, which would be a disaster for a firm as large as Sun Microsystems.

Post #2

Reply
Submitted by turlington.christy on 02/23/2010 - 3:06AM

catalogue design outsourcing | e greeting cards design outsourcing | tv ads outsourcing

3d model design outsourcing | power point presentation design outsourcing

Post #3

Join the Discussion

You must be a registered user in order to comment on HPCwire stories.

Members enjoy:

	Access to Special Content, including Podcasts, Webcasts, and Whitepapers and more!
	Ability to take an active role in the discussions that are shaping the HPC technology discipline!
	Special offers available only to HPCwire members!

Become a Registered User Today!

Registered Users Log in Here to Comment

Email Address:	Password (case sensitive)

Remember me	Forgot Password?

Michael Feldman

Michael Feldman is the editor of HPCwire.

More Michael Feldman

Feature Articles

HPC Powers Bobsled Team to Olympic Gold

For the first time in 62 years, the four-man Olympics bobsled team from the US captured the gold medal, setting a course world record in the process. The winning bobsled had some state-of-the-art engineering behind it, including CFD software from Exa Corporation. As it turned out, that software may have proved to be the margin of difference in the race.
Read More...

The Week in Review

Cray and Microsoft Research partner on cloud computing project; IBM donates a POWER7-based supercomputer to Rice University; and the Kavli Foundation hosts a dialogue on the convergence of nanoscience and neuroscience. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.
Read More...

Fixstars Launches Linux for CUDA

Multicore software specialist Fixstars Corporation has released Yellow Dog Enterprise Linux (YDEL) for CUDA, the first commercial Linux distribution for GPU computing. The OS is aimed at HPC customers using NVIDIA GPU hardware to accelerate their vanilla Linux clusters, and is designed to lower the overall cost of system deployment, the idea being to bring these still-exotic systems into the mainstream.
Read More...

Read more HPCwire features...

Top Headlines

Can Free Software Drive the Fourth Paradigm?

Mar 09 | Free Software Magazine | Data-driven computing will need open software. Read more...

Graphics Card Maker Turns to High-Performance Bioinformatics

Mar 09 | Bio-IT World | Tahoe Informatics founder eyes GPUs, CUDA software. Read more...

CFD: Light at the End of the Tunnel?

Mar 08 | Sporting Life | Formula One engineers differ on benefits of CFD. Read more...

AMD Tries to Draw Intel Into Chip Battle

Mar 08 | InfoWorld | AMD offers up 48-core server prize. Read more...

HPC Madness: March Is More Cores Month

Mar 04 | Linux Magazine | The new x86 multicore offerings could portend big changes for HPC platforms. Read more...

Read more headlines...

Featured Whitepapers

Virtualization for Aggregation And The vSMP Architecture™

Jan 12 | | In-depth look at vSMP Foundation server virtualization technology, technical implementation, use cases and capabilities. The technical whitepaper provides an architectural overview and details on the three vSMP Foundation products: vSMP Foundation for SMP, vSMP Foundation for Cluster and vSMP Foundation for Cloud.

Copper Cable Technologies for High Performance Computing

Jan 18 | | This white paper discusses Gore’s copper cable assemblies, and how they continue to exceed the standards for providing reliable, cost-effective solutions for high-performance computer applications.

View the White Paper Library

Multimedia

Webcast: Virtualized Data Center Roundtable

Join this online panel discussion for live Q&A with leading industry experts, analysts, and end-users to discuss the latest innovations, best practices, barriers to implementation, and measurable benefits of server virtualization with a particular focus on today's real world solutions.

Webcast: Watch SC09 Birds of a Feather Video: Scalable Fault-Tolerant HPC Supercomputers

Learn about scalable fault-tolerant architectures and examples of energy efficient and scalable supercomputing clusters using dual QDR InfiniBand to combine capacity computing with network failover capabilities with the help of programming languages such as MPI and a robust Linux cluster management package.

Webcast: High Performance Computing for a Smarter Planet

LIVE@SCO9: The IBM team discusses new innovations in hardware, software and services that help clients better understand their workloads and get insight from their R&D efforts. Technology demonstrations include the soon-to-be-released Power7 HPC processor, the DCS990 system with 2.4 petabytes of storage, the xCAT management tool, secure HPC cloud computing and more. Winners of two HPCwire Readers' and Editors’ Choice Awards! Take the IBM virtual tour at SC09 or more information go online to: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/deepcomputing/sc09.html