ORNL's Jaguar supercomputer moves to # 1 on list of World's Fastest Computers

OAK RIDGE - After a year at No. 2, Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Jaguar has emerged as the world's fastest computer, according to the Top500 rankings unveiled today.




The newly updated Cray XT5 system passed a benchmark test at 1.759 quadrillion mathematical calculations per second - or 1.759 petaflops. That easily surpassed the IBM Roadrunner at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Roadrunner's qualifying speed, 1.04 petaflops, actually declined slightly from the last ranking because of a reconfiguration of the computer.



The University of Tennessee's Kraken supercomputer, another Cray XT5 system that's housed at ORNL and was upgraded at the same time as Jaguar, rose to third on the worldwide list with a benchmark rating of 832 teraflops - or 832 trillion calculations per second.



Release of the new list, which is put together every six months by an international team (that includes UT's Jack Dongarra), was embargoed until early this morning. The formal announcement of the new rankings is to take place this week at the world supercomputing conference in Portland, Ore. Former Vice President Al Gore is scheduled to be a keynote speaker.



Jeff Nichols, ORNL's scientific computing chief, and others from the Oak Ridge lab planned to attend the supercomputing conference.



In an interview before he left for Portland, Nichols was thrilled about Jaguar's No. 1 ranking, which he said would draw more attention to ORNL's leadership role in scientific computing and help continue a strong trend of attracting top talent to the Oak Ridge laboratory.



Mostly, however, Nichols said he wanted to emphasize the importance of the science research that's being conducted with Jaguar and the stable of other supercomputers at ORNL. Researchers are using Jaguar to tackle some of the grand scientific challenges, such as understanding and predicting climate change, developing new energy sources, and helping design new materials that may improve consumer products or save human lives.



Nichols said the new Jaguar system is running chemistry codes with remarkable ease, opening up new research possibilities.



ORNL's Jaguar Cray XT5 system has a theoretical peak speed of 2.332 petaflops, and an earlier version of Jaguar, a Cray XT4, is still highly ranked (No. 15) and a valuable research tool. It's conceivable that the Oak Ridge lab could link the two Jaguar systems together, with an operating capability of 2.595 petaflops.



Even when Jaguar was ranked No. 2, Oak Ridge officials claimed the machine was clearly the world's best computer because of its broad research capabilities and 362 terabytes of memory, which is reportedly almost triple that of any other machine.



Jaguar was upgraded last summer with new six-core processors - code-named Istanbul - from AMD. The upgrade was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy with nearly $20 million in Recovery Act funding.



The Kraken was upgraded with the same processors, making it the world's fastest computer for academic uses. UT's machine was funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation.



With Jaguar and Kraken housed on the Oak Ridge campus, ORNL is the only institution in the world with two petascale supercomputers - each capable of more than a quadrillion (or 1,000 trillion) calculations per second. A third petascale computer is expected to be operating within the next year, thanks to a new $215 million agreement with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. NOAA has already provided ORNL with more than $70 million to purchase a new supercomputer that will be dedicated to climate research, and the lab is expected to issue a request for proposals from computer vendors by the end of the year.

Original article: http://bit.ly/2hmVxL