National Center for Computational Sciences

First cabinets arrive at ORNL

By: Scott Jones

The National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has begun receiving the first cabinets of its upcoming Cray XT5 petascale upgrade to its Jaguar supercomputer, a system that will soon be among the most powerful in the world.

The upgraded Jaguar will feature liquid-cooled cabinets and quad-core AMD OpteronTM 2.3 gigahertz processors and will be housed in ORNL’s Computational Sciences Building. The cabinets for the new machine use Cray’s new ECOphlex™ cooling system to sustain the estimated peak power demand of more than 6.5 megawatts.

Jaguar will allow the current leadership research at the NCCS to continue and expand in numerous scientific arenas such as climate modeling, astrophysics, and fusion energy. While the current terascale system is a computational giant in its own right, the new Jaguar will be nearly four times as powerful, enabling a new era in simulation science.

For example, petascale simulations of high-temperature superconductors will explain the differences in transition temperatures between superconducting materials, greatly increasing the capacity for electronic storage; climate scientists will have the ability to better integrate models for the global ocean, sea ice, land, and atmosphere, better preparing policymakers to deal with the ramifications of climate change; and fusion scientists are working out details of the 100-million-degree ITER reactor, increasing our understanding of such issues as ion and electron turbulence and moving toward a secure energy future.

Other scientific disciplines that stand to benefit include astrophysics, numerous areas of chemistry and biology, and computer science.

The new Jaguar will be the only open science petascale system in the world when it comes online in 2009, allowing the scientific community to address the world’s most pressing dilemmas through collaborative research and information sharing. The arrival of the first Jaguar cabinets represents a significant milestone in the achievement of this goal.

The National Institute for Computational Sciences (NICS), managed by the University of Tennessee and ORNL, is also due to bring a petascale system online in 2009. With two petascale machines under one roof, ORNL will be the world’s most powerful computing complex and the epicenter of scientific progress via simulation.