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Oak Ridge Lab Supercomputer Doubles Performance

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the big-iron dept.

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.'"

3 of 89 comments (clear)

  1. Awesome by Donniedarkness · · Score: 4, Interesting
    That's awesome. You know what's a shame, though?

    I live in Tennessee, not too far from Oak Ridge (45 mins away). Most kids don't even know that there are labs there. The teachers don't mention them in school, and nobody cares.

    Honestly, there's not much in Tennessee that's special (I've lived here for all 18 years of my life), so I wish they'd actually TELL us about the awesome stuff we _DO_ have near us.

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    1. Re:Awesome by Chineseyes · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Yes and I'd like to thank you and everyone else at BNL I was a student at Brentwood HS and at 16 around 1997 or so I was allowed to visit BNL once a week for a few months and even had a mentor. I was allowed to see the particle accelerator you have there and witness a lot of the projects that were ongoing. I also learned a lot of simple concepts such as the Norton and Thevenin equivalents, current divider rules, and even got a brief (although confusing at the time) introduction to second order LRC ciruits. The simple exposure to many of these concepts got me started on my path to Computer Engineer as a major. If it wasn't for some of the fine people at BNL I might have never chosen Computer Engineering as a major and made a career out of something that I love to do. Out of curiosity do they still have a mentoring program there?

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  2. What kind of calculations? by Bromskloss · · Score: 2, Interesting

    How is the speed measured? Blurb says "54 trillion calculations per second", but what kind of calculations is it? Moving of register content? Multiplication of 64 bit floating point numbers?

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