National Center for Computational Sciences

Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s revved-up “Jaguar” passed its 72-hour acceptance test with high marks, and the supercomputer now has a peak capability of 119 trillion calculations per second - or 119 teraflops.

“It’s truly the fastest ‘open science’ machine in the world,” Thomas Zacharia, ORNL’s scientific computing chief, said Wednesday.

The lab’s staff combined 68 newly arrived cabinets of the Cray XT4 system with 58 cabinets already on hand at the National Center for Computational Sciences.

The reconfigured system was put through a “very rigorous acceptance test,” which concluded in the wee hours of Wednesday morning, Zacharia said.

The test runs included a number of real-life applications, including computer codes associated with advanced simulation of materials at the atomic scale, he said.

One of the material codes had a sustained performance that was 68 percent of the computer’s peak capability, Zacharia said. Other codes ran at about 36 percent, he said.

“These are the kinds of things you would expect out of a well-balanced, high-performance machine,” Zacharia said. “We’re thrilled.”

The upgraded Jaguar will now be turned over to researchers for complex problems that can’t be solved any other way, Zacharia said. The research projects include work on climate change, chemistry, astrophysics and fusion energy.

In addition to use by researchers from universities and national laboratories, some time on the ORNL supercomputer is allotted to private industry.

“Boeing is doing advanced design of their (airplane) wings using this machine,” Zacharia said.

The ORNL official lauded the work of Cray Inc., which built the units for Jaguar at its Chippewa Falls, Wis., manufacturing facility. But he also praised the leadership team at ORNL’s computing center.

“In order for this to work, we have to have these applications ready to run on these machines. It took some of our smartest people working around the clock so that we could get this turned over to the users,” Zacharia said.

Meanwhile, Cray announced this week that ORNL’s Jaguar had set a new performance record for running weather-forecasting software. Using the Oak Ridge machine for a test run of the Weather and Research Forecast software, scientists were able to generate a one-day weather forecast at 2.5-kilometer resolution for the entire United States in as little as 18 minutes, the company said.

It reportedly takes several hours to perform the operation on other supercomputers.

Zacharia said weather-forecasting calculations were a one-time test to better understand how certain codes would perform. But he made it clear that weather forecasting is not one of the missions for the ORNL machine.

He said the weather-forecasting test was done before the two Jaguar systems were combined. “It only used a portion of the machine,” he said.

Later this year, Jaguar will be upgraded again. New processors will be loaded into the cabinets. That will more than double the peak operating capability to about 250 teraflops.

Within the next two years, the Oak Ridge lab expects to have a new petascale machine from Cray, with a peak capability exceeding 1,000 trillion calculations per second.

Source: KnoxNews
By: Frank Munger