The retooled Jaguar supercomputer blew away the competition on the latest list of the 500 fastest computers in the world, clocking an incredible 1.759 petaflops — 1,759 trillion calculations per second.

The machine, housed at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, added two more cores with the aid of almost $20 million in stimulus spending. With the new processors, the Cray XT5 plowed past the Top500 competition. It’s more than 69 percent faster than the previous record holder, Los Alamos National Laboratory’s IBM Roadrunner, and is more than twice as powerful as the third-fastest computer on the list.

But it’s not just how many calculations the machine performs that’s noteworthy. The new supercomputer also marks a turning point in the placement for funding of America’s computing resources.

Jaguar’s spot atop the list marks the first time a civilian Department of Energy computer has been the most powerful in the world. Instead of modeling nuclear explosions, which is Roadrunner’s primary job, Jaguar carries out scientific research on the globe’s climate and other computational-intensive problems.

“Supercomputer modeling and simulation is changing the face of science and sharpening America’s competitive edge,” said Department of Energy Secretary Steven Chu. “Oak Ridge and other DOE national laboratories are helping address major energy and climate challenges and lead America toward a clean energy future.”

The Department of Energy has long been a chimera of different research components. The DOE was created out of the Energy Research and Development Agency in the late 1970s, which was itself formed largely out of the Atomic Energy Commission in 1974. The AEC managed the national laboratory system that developed during the Manhattan Project and was responsible for both civilian and military nuclear research.

Built on this strange mix and shaped by the ’70s energy crises, the agency’s roles managing nuclear weapons and civilian energy research have shared the same slice of the federal budget— and defense spending, or civilian research with military applications, tended to receive the lion’s share of that slice.

In recent years, research into clean energy has received increasing support, a trend which has accelerated under new secretary, Steven Chu, who has directed much of the stimulus spending into developing new energy technologies. The appearance of a civilian DOE computer in the top spot on the supercomputer list is a sign of the times.

It should be noted, though, that the split between military and civilian supercomputers hasn’t been hard and fast. Supercomputers built to study nuclear explosions have long allocated spare computing time for other types of science.

What’s special about Jaguar is that it’s operated entirely within the DOE’s Office of Science, so civilian science gets priority for the one billion processor hours that the machine can offer.

Jaguar is operated by the National Center for Computational Sciences, which is headed by James Hack, a climate modeler by training. He said Jaguar’s upgrades allow for progressively better climate models, continuing a trend that’s been at work for decades.

“From the early 80s it may be close to a million fold improvement in computational performance,” Hack said.

Back then, climate models had to break up the earth’s surface into chunks with an area of 3,900 square miles. Now, they can run simulations where each unit is just 10 to 20 square miles. In the old models, Lake Erie would have been two or three boxes. Now, it could be represented by more than 1,000 individual units that can more accurately reflect local conditions.

All that resolution is increasing the accuracy of the simulations. In July, a model run on the supercomputer became the first to accurately depict an abrupt climate change in the past.

“The speed and power of petascale computing enables researchers to explore increased complexity in dynamic systems,” Hack said in a press release.

In the Moore’s Law driven world of supercomputing, Jaguar — at least in its current incarnation — is not likely to lead the list for long. Several plans are afoot for computers that will carry out tens of petaflops that could be running in just a few years.





Image: A very high-resolution model of carbon flux as dawn breaks across the United States. The green represents carbon uptake, while the red shows carbon outflow/ORNL. Video: Climate model run on Jaguar.

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