Oak Ridge upgrades Jaguar to Istanbul and 2 petaFLOPS

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Here is news from Cray that Oak Ridge National Lab has signed a deal to upgrade the world’s second largest computer, the mammoth Jaguar system, by swapping out the current quadcore Opterons for the six-core version by the end of 2009, bringing the total peak capability of that machine to 2 PF and nearly a quarter of a million cores.

Cray logoThe contract to upgrade the Jaguar system will increase the number of the Cray XT5 supercomputer’s processing cores to more than 224,000. The upgrade is expected to be installed and accepted by the end of 2009.

“What makes this upgrade to Jaguar truly exciting for us is the realization that the scientists and engineers using Jaguar will now have a faster and more powerful tool on their hands for achieving important scientific breakthroughs,” said Peter Ungaro, president and CEO of Cray. “The Cray XT5 system at Oak Ridge remains the first and only supercomputer in the world to run real-world, scientific applications at over a sustained petaflops, and we are very proud of this groundbreaking achievement. When the upgrade is complete, this performance level will increase and the scientific community will benefit — that is what matters most to us.”

If this happens on schedule — and if Cray didn’t bend over backwards to get this business on terms that are disadvantageous to the business — it will likely play a big part in determining whether they will be profitable this year and meet their projections.