National Center for Computational Sciences

Global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. today announced the Cray XT supercomputer at the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) set a new world record for computer speed with sustained performance of over a petaflops (quadrillion mathematical calculations per second) on two scientific applications. Sustained performance on real-world applications is the most critical measure of supercomputing performance. This allows scientists and engineers to dramatically increase the size, realism and complexity of simulations used to address fundamental scientific problems.

An ORNL research team recorded an unprecedented sustained performance of 1.35 petaflops on a superconductivity application used in nanotechnology and materials science research on the 1.64 petaflops system, nicknamed “Jaguar.” The team’s simulation ran on over 150,000 of Jaguar’s 180,000-plus processing cores. The latest simulations on Jaguar were the first in which the team had enough computing power to move beyond ideal, perfectly ordered materials to the imperfect materials that typify the real world. Research into the nature of materials promises to revolutionize many areas of modern life, from power generation and transmission to transportation to the production of faster, smaller, more versatile computers and storage devices.

The petaflops barrier was broken on a second application with 1.05 petaflops of sustained performance. The new performance levels for this application, a first-principles material science computer model used to perform studies involving the interactions between a large number of atoms, are expected to support advancements in magnetic storage.

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