National Center for Computational Sciences

Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Jaguar - already one of the world’s fastest computers - is getting a serious upgrade. In the process, Jaguar has given birth to a speedy little cub.

The new quad-core processors that are being installed in Jaguar are so powerful that the reconfigured Cray XT4 system will require only 84 of its existing 124 cabinets to reach the processing goal of 250 trillion calculations per second, up from the previous peak of 119 trillion.

Therefore, computer chieftains at ORNL have segregated the system’s other 40 cabinets, with their dual-core processors, and are operating it now as a separate Cray XT3 supercomputer.

Baby Jaguar has a peak capability of nearly 40 teraflops, or 40 trillion calculations, per second, still offering plenty of processing power for high-end scientific research. In fact, ORNL’s climate modelers and other researchers are using Baby Jaguar while the main Jaguar system is being reworked.

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