The members of the National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) have something to be truly proud of. I am talking about the Jaguar supercomputer which after a number of upgrades is now the fastest supercomputer available for scientific number crunching. Jaguar is a combination of Cray XT4 and XT5 parts and after a recent upgrade boasts a total of 181,000 processing cores.
The XT system has grown in strength through a series of advances since being installed as a 25-teraflop XT3 in 2005. By early 2008 Jaguar was a 263-teraflop Cray XT4 able to solve some of the most challenging problems that could not be solved otherwise. In 2008 Jaguar was expanded with the addition of a 1.4-petaflop Cray XT5. The resulting system has over 181,000 processing cores connected internally with Cray's Seastar2+ network. The XT4 and XT5 parts of Jaguar are combined into a single system using an InfiniBand network that links each piece to the Spider file system.
The machine is built using 45,376 quad-core AMD Opteron CPUs and has a total of 362 Terabytes of memory. I won't even mention the amount of electrical power necessary to run this machine. In case you are wondering what operating system each of the nodes runs, you should know that it is a modified version of SuSE Linux; unsurprisingly, it had to be some flavor of UNIX.
Jaguar is available to universities, industry, government, and non-profit organizations all of which compete under a peer-reviewed process for access to the machine.
A couple of days ago, I wrote about the Quadro 5800 FX GPU that has 250 CUDA processing units. I referred to it as a massively parallel machine but compared to the Jaguar I have to admit that it is much like comparing a Ford Escort to a Lamborghini sports car.
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