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Jaguar, World's Most Powerful Supercomputer
Protoclown writes "The National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS), located at Oak Ridge National Labs (ORNL) in Tennessee, has upgraded the Jaguar supercomputer to 1.64-petaflops for use by scientists and engineers working in areas such as climate modeling, renewable energy, materials science, fusion and combustion. The current upgrade is the result of an addition of 200 cabinets of the Cray XT5 to the existing 84 cabinets of the XT4 Jaguar system. Jaguar is now the world's most powerful supercomputer available for open scientific research."
There is a queueing system. If you want to run a job on a machine like this, you log into the control node (which is just a linux box) and submit your job to the queue, including how many CPU's you need for it and how much time you need on them.
A scheduling algorithm then determines when the various jobs waiting in the queue get to run, and sends mail to their owners when they start and stop.
On many machines there is a debug queue with low limits for number of CPU's and runtime, and thus fast turnover; this is used to run little jobs to ensure everything is working right before you submit the big job to the main queue.
Each project has an al
I believe Cray made its partnership with AMD quite a while ago while they were still ahead of Intel in the performance/power ratio. In addition, these machines have a very fast interconnect (SeaStar) that is based on HyperTransport links. I believe it was recently announced that Cray has formed a partnership with Intel, and I imagine they will port the technology to QuickPath for future machines, but QPI was not available at the time this machine was commissioned. One does not simply order a machine like this at the drop of a hat. Vendor decisions are typically made years ahead of time.