Cray Jaguar, the most powerful computer in the world.

Image courtesy of the National Center for Computational Sciences, Oak Ridge National Laboratory

In November 2009, Cray Jaguar was named #1 on the Top500 list of the world’s most powerful computers. Jaguar is the most powerful computer system for science with world leading performance, and world leading bandwidth to disks and networks. The AMD Opteron processor is a powerful, general purpose processor that uses the X86 instruction set which has a rich set of applications, compilers, and tools. Jaguar has hundreds of applications that have been ported and run on the Cray XT system, many of which have been scaled up to run on large numbers of cores. Jaguar takes on the most challenging problems in the world.

The XT system has grown in strength through a series of advances since being installed as a 25-teraflop XT3 in 2005. By early 2008 Jaguar was a 263-teraflop Cray XT4 able to solve some of the most challenging problems that could not be solved otherwise. In 2008 Jaguar was expanded with the addition of a 1.4-petaflop Cray XT5, and in fall 2009 the system was upgraded with Six-Core AMD Opteron processors, increasing the number of its processing cores to more than 224,000, connected internally.

The National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS), sponsored by the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Science, manages Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s (ORNL) Jaguar supercomputer for use by scientists and engineers solving problems of national and global importance. The machine, with a peak performance of more than two petaflops, makes it possible to address some of the most challenging scientific problems in areas such as climate modeling, renewable energy, materials science, fusion and combustion

Throughout its series of upgrades, Jaguar has maintained a consistent programming model for the users. This programming model allows users to continue to evolve their existing codes rather than write new ones. Applications that ran on previous versions of Jaguar can be recompiled, tuned for efficiency, and then run on the new machine.

Alzheimers DNA structure as rendered by the Cray Jaguar, “Image courtesy of the National Center for Computational Sciences, Oak Ridge National Laboratory

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