Oak Ridge Lab Supercomputer Doubles Performance

Anonymous Coward writes "The most powerful supercomputer available for general scientific research in the United States has undergone an upgrade that's doubled its peak performance. The Cray XT3 supercomputer at Tennessee's Oak Ridge National Laboratory can now perform up to 54 trillion calculations per second, up from its previous peak of 25 trillion calculations. 'It is probably the fifth-fastest machine' in the world, said Thomas Zacharia, associate laboratory director. 'It is clearly the fastest open-science machine in the U.S. today.'"

Comments

Maybe they're getting ready

[flinxmeister]

for the Vista upgrade.

Jumping the gun a bit, probably.

Now for a Practical Use

[queenb**ch]

Now that we have all that horsepower, the big decision comes....what to do with it? I have some suggestions that I think would greatly benefit mankind as a whole.

1) Decrypt NSA keys so we can spy on them for a change
2) Develop a fool-proof method of determing what is spam and forwarding it all to Bill Gates
3) Calculate winning lotto numbers and donate the money to random charities
4) Develop an algorythm that decides where to go for dinner
5) Figure out how to make a pad that acutally stays in place AND doesn't stick to my a$$

2 cents,

QueenB

Re:Now for a Practical Use

[legoburner]

My christening of a new, uber-machine is normally done with the very very old-style pong. Nothing like multiple Ghz on multiple cores with a projector, TBs of HDD space and it all being used to run classic pong. Especially high-def classic pong.

Re:Now for a Practical Use

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Speaking of which, what exactly is the machine calculating right now? Oak Ridge's tax return?

According to the law

[Anonymous Coward]

They have to double it every 18 months.

Imagine!

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine a beowulf cluster of these!

What happened?

[Anonymous Coward]

Did someone lean on the turbo button?

Lt. Commander Data does 60 trillion

[Anonymous Coward]

In ST:TNG, Lt. Commander Data does 60 trillion operations per second. If they could just squeeze 6 more trillion operations out of that supercomputer, and get the right software and memory access speed, and fit it all into a Mac Mini-sized space, we could have our first sentient starfleet officer ready before Dr. Sung.

But the question on everyone's mind...

[caudron]

Does it use Blue Ray or HD-DVD?

Tom Caudron
http://tom.digitalelite.com/

In the quest for the answer to the ultimate...

[owlnation]

question of life the universe and everything it was not, of course, as big as the Earth. A computer so large that it was often mistaken for a planet. Except by the IAU who saw through the Earth's feeble attempt to be considered a planet and reclassified it as a large pocket calculator...

Whether the inhabitants of Earth's matrix retaliate by reclassifying astronomers as pseudoscientists remains to be seen...

Tribute to Johnny Carson

[$RANDOMLUSER]

Johnny: Wow, I tell ya, that new Oak Ridge supercomputer is fast.
Crowd: How fast is it?
Johnny: Awh, it's so fast, it'll do an infinite loop in seven seconds.
MaMahon: Yessss!

Re:Awesome

[Pollardito]

maybe The Oak Ridge Boys could sing a song about the lab to raise public awareness (to the tune of Elvira) :

I'm singin'
El Jaguar, El Jaguar
Five thousand Opterons on fire, El Jaguar

Giddy Up Oom Poppa Omm Poppa Mow Mow
Giddy Up Oom Poppa Omm Poppa Mow Mow
Heigh-ho Silver, away

Tonight I'm gonna ray trace me a big ol' honkin' scene
And I'm gonna give her all the poly's I can, yes I am
She's gonna have lights, shades and fill-ins
'Cause I saved up my last two hundred million
We're gonna go and find that researcher man