National Center for Computational Sciences

A Cray XT5 supercomputer named Jaguar that runs scientific applications at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) placed in three out of four categories at the High-Performance Computing (HPC) Challenge awards, winning two “gold medals” and one “bronze” in this head-to-head competition. Results of the challenge, which measures excellence at handling computing workloads, were announced Nov. 18 in Austin at SC08, an international gathering of supercomputing professionals.

Jaguar won first place for both speed in solving a dense matrix of linear algebra equations (running a software code called High-Performance Linpack, or HPL) and sustainable memory bandwidth?or how many gigabytes per second a node can fetch and store (running the STREAM code). It won third place for speed in executing the Global-Fast Fourier Transformation, a common algorithm used in many scientific applications.

“The Cray Jaguar at ORNL winning two of the HPC Challenge benchmarks shows the power and potential of the computer system for handling some of the most challenging computational science problems,” said Jack Dongarra of University of Tennessee–Knoxville and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. “It was able to produce an impressive 902 teraflops [trillion floating point operations per second] on HPL and 330 TB/s [terabytes per second] on STREAMS. Both results leave the second-place IBM Blue Gene/L at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory far behind and demonstrates the balance between computing and communication bandwidth.”

ORNL also contributed to another award with Cray’s Bruce Chamberlain sharing the award for the most elegant implementation of the HPC Challenge benchmark applications in Cray’s new “Chapel” computer language and testing its performance on Jaguar.

Continue reading at HPCwire.com.