National Center for Computational Sciences

Q: How far is it from Barcelona to Istanbul?
A: Hmmm . . . About a petaflop.

ORNL’s Buddy Bland, project director of the Leadership Computing Facility, actually laughed (modestly) at my little joke this afternoon, when he took a few minutes to talk about the upgrades taking place on the Jaguar and Kraken supercomputers.

The joke, of course, stems from the fact that both of the Cray XT5 computer systems are getting a serious boost with the installation of new AMD six-core processors, code-named “Istanbul.” And, yes, they’re replacing some of the quad-core bunch known as Barcelona.

Back in early June, I reported that ORNL would be using stimulus money to upgrade Jaguar and possibly make the supercomputer the world’s fastest (it’s currently No. 2 on the Top500 list and far and away the most powerful for open scientific uses).

A few days ago Cray announced that it had received the contract from DOE to do the Jaguar upgrade, and Bland told me today that some of the Istanbul processors had already arrived in Oak Ridge and that work was under way.

Bland said a few of Jaguar’s 200 cabinets had been segregated from the rest of the system (still being used by researchers) and were being fitted this week with the new six-core processors. They will be tested to make sure there aren’t any issues, he said.

“It’s due dilligence,” Bland said. “We’ll try it out. We’ll check out the software. We’ll check out the hardware.”

A few of the Kraken cabinets will be upgraded next week, as the plan is to alternate work on the two Cray systems and get them both ready simultaneously, the ORNL official said.

“In several weeks, we’ll upgade some more on Jaguar and then some more on Kraken,” Bland said.

The Jaguar upgrade, of course, is being funded with Recovery Act money from the Department of Energy, while the work on Kraken — a University of Tennessee computer — is funded by the National Science Foundation. Both are housed in ORNL’s National Center for Computational Sciences, and the money to do both upgrades is now available.

Continue reading at TMC.net.