AMD-Powered Cray World’s Fastest Computer

Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Cray XT5 supercomputer called "Jaguar" is now the fastest computer in the world, edging out IBM’s Roadrunner on the semi-annual Top500 Supercomputers list.

Jaguar is made up of 224,256 compute cores, each containing two hex-core AMD Opteron processors, 16GB memory, and a SeaStar 2+ router, in addition to dedicated login/service nodes. It runs on Cray Linux. The Cray XT5 won the title by processing at 1.75 petaflops. A petaflop equals one quadrillion (or one thousand trillion) floating point operations per second. Roadrunner came in second with 1.04 petaflops. Wile E. Coyote came in third. Just kidding. It was actually another Cray XT5.

The Top 10 Fastest:

1. Jaguar, Cray, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (1.75 petaflop/s)
2. Roadrunner, IBM, Los Alamos National Laboratory (1.04 petaflop/s)
3. Kraken XT5, Cray, National Institute for Computational Sciences (832 teraflop/s)
4. JUGENE, IBM, Forschungszentrum Juelich (825.5 teraflop/s)
5. Tianhe-1, NUDT, National SuperComputer Center in Tianjin (563.1 teraflop/s)
6. Pleiades, SGI, NASA Ames Research Center (544.3 teraflop/s)
7. BlueGeneL, IBM, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (478.2 teraflop/s)
8. BlueGene/P, IBM, Argonne National Laboratory (458.61 teraflop/s)
9. Ranger, Sun, Texas Advanced Computing Center (433.20 teraflop/s)
10. Red Sky, Sun, Sandia National Laboratories (423.9 teraflop/s)

The the past six months, Jaguar has helped research teams in astrophysics, climate science, chemistry, fusion, materials science, nuclear energy, physics, geosciences, bioenergy, and combustion, including building climate models at unparalleled resolutions, calculating the flux of uranium into the Columbia River from aging underground storage facilities, studies related to production of bioethanol from plants. All of which used up over 355 million total hours processor time.

China and Germany’s entries are the only non-US computers in the top ten. Through AMD won top spot, Intel still is inside 80 percent of the hardware on the list.

You can take a look at the complete Top500 List head at the Top500 site.

Photo by Marcin Wichary, Creative Commons Attribution License