Tennessee, Aug 26: The most powerful supercomputer available for general scientific research in the United States has doubled its speed, officials have said.
The 54-cabinet Cray XT3 supercomputer at Tennessee's Oak Ridge National Laboratory has been upgraded from 25 teraflops to 54 teraflops, or 54 trillion mathematical calculations per second, they said on Friday.
"It is probably the fifth-fastest machine" in the world, said Thomas Zacharia, associate laboratory director. "It is clearly the fastest open science machine in the US today."
The supercomputer, dubbed "Jaguar," was ranked 13th fastest before the upgrade. A list of the 500 most powerful computers in the world is compiled by scientists at the University of Mannheim in Germany, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the University of Tennessee.
"The list is a very simple measure, and it is a good thing, obviously," Zacharia said. "But the real winner in these things are the scientists who are running these machines.
"(They) have been very pleased at the initial performance of this upgraded machine," he said. "It is a terrific scientific instrument."
The overhaul was the first step in a multiyear, nearly USD 200 million contract between Seattle-based Cray Inc and the US Department of Energy to increase Oak Ridge's supercomputing capability to 1,000 trillion calculations per second, or one petaflop, by 2009.
Bureau Report
First Published: Saturday, August 26, 2006, 00:00