Jaguar Supercomputer Claws Its Way to the Top

ORNL's Jaguar supercomputer is officially the fastest computer in the world. Capable of 2.3 petaflops, or 2,300 trillion calculations per second, Jaguar is now the research community's most powerful computational tool for exploring solutions to a variety of grand scientific challenges such as climate, alternative fuels and energy storage. The Oak Ridge machine received the designation at the SC09 international supercomputing conference in Portland, Oregon.

"Our computational center works closely with the science teams to help them use a computer system of this size and capability," said James Hack, director of the National Center for Computational Sciences, which houses Jaguar in the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility.

The Oak Ridge computing complex is home to two of the world's three most powerful machines. In addition to DOE's Jaguar, a partnership between the University of Tennessee and ORNL operates another petascale Cray XT5 system for the National Science Foundation known as Kraken, which was ranked 3rd on the Top500 list with a speed of 831.7 teraflops. A third machine of comparable size will be installed this year for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

"The purpose of these machines is to enable the scientific community to tackle problems of such complexity that they demand a well-tuned combination of the best hardware, optimized software and a community of researchers dedicated to revealing new phenomena through modeling and simulations," said ORNL Director Thom Mason. "Oak Ridge is proud to help the Department of Energy address some of the world's most daunting scientific challenges."

The early petascale results indicate that Jaguar will continue to accelerate the Department of Energy's mission of breakthrough science. With increased computational capability, the scientific research community is able to obtain results faster, understand better the complexities involved and provide critical information to policy-makers.

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