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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.'"

19 of 89 comments (clear)

  1. Maybe they're getting ready by flinxmeister · · Score: 4, Funny

    for the Vista upgrade.

    Jumping the gun a bit, probably.

  2. Now for a Practical Use by queenb**ch · · Score: 4, Funny

    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

    --
    HDGary secures my bank :/
    1. Re:Now for a Practical Use by legoburner · · Score: 3, Funny

      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.

      --
      Warhammer forums
    2. Re:Now for a Practical Use by ObsessiveMathsFreak · · Score: 2, Funny

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

      --
      May the Maths Be with you!
  3. 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.

    --
    Earn a % of cash back from Newegg, Tiger Direct, Walmart.com, and more: http://www.mrrebates.com?refid=458505
    1. Re:Awesome by gbjbaanb · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Don't whinge to slashdot about it, phone the labs, phoen the school principal, get a few school trips round there organised. I doubt they'll see much (I understand they don't have any flashing lights and spinning tape drives anymore, which is when computers looked like they were big, powerful and doing important stuff) but I'm sure there'll be scientists more than happy to show them something impressive and talk about what they're up to.

    2. Re:Awesome by matthewcraig · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I guess they don't call Oak Ridge "the secret city" for nothing, then!

    3. Re:Awesome by chillax137 · · Score: 3, Informative

      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
    4. Re:Awesome by beamdriver · · Score: 5, Informative
      Actually, we encourage people to visit us. Either during the summer or any time they want to schedule a tour.

      Of course, there's no major weapons work going on at BNL. At least, none that I know of.

    5. 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?

      --
      I think the invisible hand of the market has its middle finger extended

      --A wise old fart named SC0RN
    6. Re:Awesome by Pollardito · · Score: 3, Funny

      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

  4. What happened? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Did someone lean on the turbo button?

  5. Lt. Commander Data does 60 trillion by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    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.

    1. Re:Lt. Commander Data does 60 trillion by Digitus1337 · · Score: 2, Informative

      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.

  6. But the question on everyone's mind... by caudron · · Score: 2, Funny

    Does it use Blue Ray or HD-DVD?

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

    --
    -Tom
  7. 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?

    --
    Swedish plasma phys. PhD student; MSc EE; knows maths, programming, electronics; finance interest; seeks opportunities
  8. In the quest for the answer to the ultimate... by owlnation · · Score: 3, Funny

    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...

  9. Tribute to Johnny Carson by $RANDOMLUSER · · Score: 4, Funny

    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!

    --
    No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
  10. 2 month old news by kill-1 · · Score: 2, Informative

    The original press release:

    http://investors.cray.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=98390&p= irol-newsArticle&ID=873357

    All they do is upgrade to dual-core Opterons, hence the double performance.