ORNL's Jaguar Poised to Get Speedy Upgrade

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According to Frank Munger’s blog, Oak Ridge National Lab’s Jaguar supercomputer is poised to get a serious upgrade.  The XT5 supercomputer, currently ranked second on the Top500 list, will upgrade its core processors to the latest AMD 6-core Istanbul from its current quad core powerplant.  Jeff Nichols, ORNL’s interim associate lab director for scientific computing, said the new silicon are expected to arrive later this summer and bump performance to “well over 2 petaflops.”

The big question is how much science are we going to get out of it, and that is the ultimate driver — to get the most science that we can for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science,” Nichols said.

The upgrade comes at the hands of a recent influx of stimulus funds.  The 200 cabinet Jaguar system will share the funds with its 88 cabinet cousin, Kraken.  The smaller, 600TF, machine is expected to get roughly a 70 percent performance bump.

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