National Center for Computational Sciences

Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Jaguar will become a two-headed beast - at least for a few weeks.

The Cray supercomputer, already the fastest U.S. machine for open scientific uses at 54 trillion calculations per second, or 54 teraflops, is being upgraded to 100 teraflops.

Sixty-eight new cabinets for Jaguar are expected to arrive here within the next two to three weeks from Cray’s manufacturing facility at Chippewa Falls, Wis.

Before those are combined with the existing 54 cabinets, however, they will be tested and operated separately on the second floor of ORNL’s National Center for Computational Sciences.

The decision was made so that research efforts with the current Jaguar configuration wouldn’t be disrupted

“It’s all about the science,” said Thomas Zacharia, ORNL’s associate lab director for computational sciences.

The existing Jaguar will continue to run in the downstairs computer room until late November or early December, when the two units will be joined in the new second-floor home.

The reason Jaguar is moving to the second floor is to make room downstairs for the next-generation Cray machine, code-named Baker during the development stage.

Baker may become the world’s first petaflop computer, capable of 1,000 trillion calculations per second.

“We want to make sure we have sufficient space downstairs for the big machine,” Zacharia said.

Earlier this year, ORNL signed a $180 million contract that included delivery of Baker, a Cray XT5, which will have a superscalar architecture similar to that of the Jaguar.

Zacharia said lab officials knew that the computer center’s second-floor space, which had been used for a conference room and other purposes, could support the weight of the Jaguar.

The cabinets for the petaflop supercomputer will be heavier, for sure, so that’s why it’s going downstairs, he said.

The ORNL computer chief said it’s possible to consolidate the entire Jaguar system from “day one,” but that would require shutting down research operations for a few weeks so the units could be properly tested.

“That would have caused more disruption to our users,” Zacharia said. “We will transition all the users from the current machine to the upstairs machine (once it begins operations) and then move the remaining cabinets. That way, the users will not have any discontinuity.”

Researchers have been getting fantastic results with the Jaguar, Zacharia said, citing work with superconductivity, climate change and other science issues.

He said the Jaguar is a hardy machine that will continue to operate at ORNL, even after the new petaflop machine comes online.

“With these upgrades, it is likely to continue to 2011 or so,” he said.

In its new home, the Jaguar will be next door to the lab’s computer visualization center called EVEREST (Exploratory Visualization Environment for Research in Science and Technology), a facility that includes a “power wall” backed by 27 projectors with an aggregate pixel count of 35 million pixels.

Source: KnoxNews
By: Frank Munger