Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Jaguar, World's Most Powerful Supercomputer

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the minimum-requirements-for-crysis dept.

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."

12 of 154 comments (clear)

  1. Economics? by thedonger · · Score: 3, Interesting

    How about economic modeling?

    --
    Help fight poverty: Punch a poor person.
    1. Re:Economics? by Draek · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Scientists are always so sure they are right. And then a few decades pass and they realize they weren't. And then they repeat that same behavior.

      Not really. Most scientists know they're always wrong, they just try to be less wrong each time. Hence the scientific method.

      There's a brilliant article by Asimov about it, in fact, "The Relativity of Wrong" if you care about it.

      --
      No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
  2. Yeah, the supercomputing stuff is nice and all... by Gizzmonic · · Score: 3, Insightful

    But I really got it to play Tempest 2000.

    --
    (-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
  3. Don't buy it by CRCulver · · Score: 3, Funny

    Yeah, Jaguar might look cool with its advanced capabilities, but there's no games for it and the controller design is lame.

  4. Kudos to Atari by rgo · · Score: 5, Funny

    I always knew you could pull it off!!

  5. Re:How does that work? by Entropius · · Score: 4, Informative

    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

  6. Re:Please no climate modelling! by thedonger · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I would say more than lack of evidence is lack of causation rather than correlation. Scientists appear to agree that at least in the short term the earth is a little warmer. What they can't say with any certainty is why. Anthropogenic warming is the desired cause as that is the only one we can do a damn thing about.

    --
    Help fight poverty: Punch a poor person.
  7. Re:good upgrade path by bmwm3nut · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Then when you get new cabinets you just decommission the oldest ones. Keep rotating the old ones out once they fall below some flop/dollar threshold.

  8. Re:Please no climate modelling! by leathered · · Score: 4, Funny

    Why do climate modelling?

    Obviously climate modelling has to be carried to out to find out what impact running energy-hungry supercomputers has on the environment.

    --
    For all intensive porpoises your a bunch of rediculous loosers
  9. Re:Silly Me by colmore · · Score: 4, Funny

    Hahah, eat it, 3DO.

    --
    In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
  10. Re:translation???? by The+Master+Control+P · · Score: 4, Funny

    Wait, shit, astronomical fail!

    It's not nearly that bad... more like 3 days. I failed to realize that my 270000 figure was seconds not years.

  11. Re:AMD vs Intel by kpesler · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.