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Jaguar's Coming Out Party
ORNL's new Jaguar supercomputer received a variety of honors at the SC08 conference in Austin, Texas—the premier international conference for high-performance computing. This recognition represented the culmination of a three-year effort to create the world's most powerful computing system. Like its namesake, the Jaguar supercomputer's forte is speed. When the rankings of the 500 fastest supercomputers were announced at the conference, Jaguar garnered honors as the fastest supercomputer in the world for open science, with a top speed of 1.64 petaflops (quadrillion calculations per second). Only the second system to ever break the petaflop barrier, Jaguar was just fractionally slower than the first petaflop system, Los Alamos National Laboratory's Roadrunner. The Roadrunner is a classified machine used primarily to perform calculations that help to ensure the reliability of the nation's nuclear weapons stockpile. Also announced at SC08 was the 2008 Association for Computing Machinery's Gordon Bell Prize—claimed by an ORNL team headed by Thomas Schulthess. The award recognized the feat of attaining the fastest performance ever in a scientific supercomputing application. The team, consisting of Schulthess, Thomas Maier, Michael Summers and Gonzalo Alvarez, achieved an application speed of 1.352 petaflops on Jaguar while running a simulation of superconductors. Finally, Jaguar won awards in three of the four categories of the High-Performance Computing Challenge competition. The Oak Ridge machine took two first place awards for speed in solving a set of linear algebra equations and for speed in fetching and storing data across a network connection. Jaguar also won third place for speed in running the Global- Fast Fourier Transformation, a common scientific algorithm.
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