ORNL Spawns Baby-Jaguar

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baby jaguarOak Ridge National Lab’s Jaguar is in the middle of receiving a serious upgrade. Apparently, in the process, mother Jaguar has spawned a baby. The reconfigured Cray XT4 system hosts quad-core processors, so post-upgrade, the system will only require 84 of the existing 124 cabinets to achieve 250 Teraflops. Rather than putting the additional 40 cabinets out to pasture, ORNL HPC gurus segregated them into their own Cray XT3 system. Baby Jaguar has a peak peformance of nearly 40 Teraflops [which is why they should send a few cabinets to my house]. Several modelers and researchers are already using Baby Jaguar while mommy is being upgraded.

So far, 16 of the 84 cabinets have been refitted with the new quad-core AMD Budapest processors. The upgrade will obviously have a positive impact on space requirements, and “very minimal” additional effects on power and cooling.

The new AMD Budapest processors are socket-compatible with the earlier machine, so we double the number of processor cores in the same physical footprint,” [Jim Rogers, director of operations at ORNL/NCCS] said. In addition, the new processors can execute four “floating point operations” per cycle compared to two in the previous system, and that doubles the peak performance on a per-processor basis, he said.

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