• Number 300  |
• November 23, 2009

Jaguar ranked world's fastest supercomputer

An upgrade to a Cray XT5 high-performance computing system  has made the Jaguar supercomputer, located at DOE's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the world’s fastest, according to the latest TOP500 ranking. The upgrade, funded with $19.9 million under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, will enable scientific simulations of dramatically increased size and complexity.

To net the number-one spot on the TOP500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers, Jaguar’s Cray XT5 component was upgraded this fall from four-core to six-core processors and ran a benchmark program called High-Performance Linpack (HPL) at a speed of 1.759 petaflop/s (quadrillion floating point operations, or calculations, per second). The University of Tennessee's Kraken supercomputer, funded by the National Science Foundation, came in third at 831 teraflop/s. Kraken is also located at ORNL.

[Mike Bradley, 865.576-9553,
bradleymk@ornl.gov]