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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.'"
He was rated at 60 trillion operations per second until Ep. #134, at which point something was done with bidirectional sequencing and his main interlink sequencer was converted to asynchronous operation. The size of his positronic links were no longer a bottleneck, and he was able to compute at a new and improved, but unspecified, speed.
I took a tour of the supercomputing facilities at the University of Oklahoma, and there was actually a lot of stuff for us to see and talk about. The air conditioning system for this room had like three fail safes, and if they all failed, the temperature of the room would increase by somewhere around 3 degrees per second. The director actually had flashing lights installed on the rack of computers. He said that when the state board of regents came around to distribute funding, it was a lot easier to persuade them when there was something to catch their attention.
chillax137
Of course, there's no major weapons work going on at BNL. At least, none that I know of.
The original press release:
= irol-newsArticle&ID=873357
http://investors.cray.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=98390&p
All they do is upgrade to dual-core Opterons, hence the double performance.