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

Awesome

[Donniedarkness]

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.

Re:Awesome

[gbjbaanb]

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.

Re:Awesome

[beamdriver]

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.

Re:Awesome

[Chineseyes]

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?

What happened?

[Anonymous Coward]

Did someone lean on the turbo button?

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!