Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility

OLCF’s Jaguar supercomputer has completed the first phase of an upgrade that will keep it among the most powerful scientific computing systems in the world.

As part of the upgrade process, Jaguar was upgraded from a Cray XT5 to an XK6 system. Even before the upgrade to 3.3 petaflops, Jaguar was the United States’ most powerful supercomputer, capable of 2,300 trillion calculations each second, or 2.3 petaflops. The same number of calculations would take an individual working at a rate of one per second more than 70 million years.

As part of the project, Jaguar’s AMD Opeteron cores were upgraded to the newest 6200 series and increased their number by a third, from 224,256 to 299,008. Two six-core Opteron processors were removed from each of Jaguar’s 18,688 nodes and replaced with a single 16-core processor. At the same time, the system’s interconnect was updated to Gemini and its memory was doubled to 600 terabytes.

In addition, 960 of Jaguar’s 18,688 compute nodes now contain an NVIDIA graphical processing unit (GPU). The GPUs were added to the system in anticipation of a much larger GPU installation later in the year, resulting in Jaguar becoming Titan (for more information on the Titan project, please visit http://olcf.ornl.gov/titan). GPUs will add a level of parallelism to the system and allow Titan to reach 10 to 20 petaflops with the same space as Jaguar and with essentially the same power requirements. While the Opteron processors have 16 cores and therefore able to carry out 16 computing tasks simultaneously, the GPUs will be able to tackle hundreds of computing tasks at the same time.

Jaguar has proved that petascale machines can produce data that lend insight into grand challenges in science and engineering. Those insights are likely to take human knowledge a giant leap forward as researchers reveal the future of regional climates, develop ways to tap new energy sources, and delve into nature and the origins of life.